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SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 


COLUMBIA  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 
SALES  AGENTS 

NEW  YORK 

LEMCKE  &  BUECHNER 
30-32  EAST  20rn  STREET 

LONDON 

HUMPHREY  MILFORD 
AMEN  CORNER,  E.G. 

SHANGHAI 

EDWARD  EVANS  &  SONS,  LTD. 
30  NORTH  SZECHUEN  ROAD 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

THE   SOLDIER'S   STANDARDS   OF   CONDUCT 

THE  WAR  AS  A  PRACTICAL  TEST  OF 
AMERICAN  SCHOLARSHIP 

WHAT  HAVE  WE  LEARNED? 


BY 

FREDERICK  PAUL  KEPPEL 

THIRD  ASSISTANT  SECRETARY  OF  WAR 


lit* 


Sot* 

COLUMBIA  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 
1920 

All  rights  reserved 


0 


Copyright,  1920 
BY  COLUMBIA.  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

Printed  from  type,  January,  1920 


PRINTED    AT 

THE-PLIMPTON-PRESS 
NORWOOD  -MASS  -U-S-A 


TO 

NEWTON  D.  BAKER 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I.  THE  AMERICAN  SOLDIER  AND  His  STANDARDS 

OF  CONDUCT 9 

II.  THE  WAR  AS  A  PRACTICAL  TEST  OF  AMERI- 
CAN SCHOLARSHIP 36 

III.  WHAT  HAVE  WE  LEARNED?  66 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

THE   AMERICAN   SOLDIER   AND   HIS 
STANDARDS  OF  CONDUCT  i 

PERHAPS  the  greatest  laboratory  experiment 
in  human  conduct  in  the  history  of  the  world 
has  been  the  development  of  our  Army  during 
the  past  two  years.  Under  the  provisions  of 
the  Selective  Service  Law,  this  Army  has  rep- 
resented a  cross  section  of  American  male 
humanity  —  even  more  representative  indeed 
than  was  intended;  for  in  the  efforts  of  the 
Local  Boards  to  send  men  who  could  best  be 
spared,  many  found  their  way  into  the  ranks  who 
were  handicapped  from  the  start  by  low  men- 
tality or  disease.  What  were  the  guiding  forces 
which  operated  upon  this  body  of  nearly  four 
million  men? 

In  the  first  place,  our  country  entered  the 
war  with  a  great  moral  purpose,  untinged  by 

1  An  address  delivered  at  the  one  hundredth  anniversary  of 
the  General  Theological  Seminary,  New  York,  April  30,  1919. 

9 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

any  trace  of  national  or  individual  selfishness. 
We  really  have  to  go  back  to  the  Crusades  to 
find  the  like.  And,  as  then,  each  man  sup- 
plemented this  great  basal  impulse  with 
whatever  was  to  him  the  strongest  incentive  - 
religion,  patriotism,  pride  of  family  or  state 
or  regiment,  the  desire  to  excel  in  what  all 
were  attempting. 

In  the  second  place,  thanks  primarily  to  the 
vision  and  determination  of  one  man,  the  in- 
dividual appeal  to  each  soldier  as  to  his  per- 
sonal share  in  the  great  enterprise  was  upon 
the  highest  plane.  We  were  fortunate  in  having 
at  the  head  of  the  War  Department  a  man 
peculiarly  sensitive  to  community  problems 
and  with  no  small  experience  in  their  solution. 
Through  the  centuries  men  had  come  to  the 
belief  that  if  their  soldiers  were  only  valiant  and 
disciplined  in  arms,  it  would  not  do  to  inquire 
too  curiously  into  their  personal  standards  of 
conduct  in  other  matters  —  that  a  considerable 
wastage  in  military  strength  from  drunkenness 
and  disease  was  inevitable.  And  as  we  all 
know,  this  wastage  has  in  the  past  sapped,  not 
only  the  strength  of  the  Army,  but  afterwards 
the  very  life  of  the  nation  to  which  the  soldier 
must  sooner  or  later  return. 

10 


THE  AMERICAN   SOLDIER 

The  Secretary  of  War  and  his  lieutenants, 
chief  among  whom  in  this  field  should  be  placed 
the  Chairman  of  the  Committee  on  Training 
Camp  Activities,  Raymond  B.  Fosdick,  ap- 
proached this  problem  neither  in  the  fatalistic 
spirit  that  what  has  always  been  must  continue 
to  be,  nor  in  a  spirit  of  what,  for  want  of  a 
better  term,  I  may  call  doctrinaire  idealism. 
They  faced  the  fact  that  among  the  hundreds 
of  thousands  of  young  men  who  were  to  be 
called  to  the  colors,  there  would  be  many  whose 
ears  would  be  deaf  to  any  abstract  appeal, 
and  many  others  to  whom  such  an  appeal  might 
be  made  under  normal  conditions,  but  who  in 
fatigue  or  the  let-down  following  the  strain  of 
conflict,  could  not  be  depended  upon  to  stand 
in  the  hour  of  temptation.  As  a  result  the 
whole  field  of  preventive  measures  was  thor- 
oughly studied  and  vigorous  treatment  was 
applied.  The  Army  regulations  as  to  prophy- 
laxis and  the  introduction  of  intoxicants  into 
camps  were  strictly  and  honestly  enforced. 
The  Army  saw  to  it  that  state  and  local  laws 
as  to  liquor  and  prostitution  were  properly 
carried  out,  and  if  these  were  lacking,  they 
were  promptly  enacted.  The  so-called  Zone 
Law  was  adopted  for  the  purpose  of  placing 

11 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

the  immediate  vicinity  of  camps  under  Federal 
control.  In  some  cases  where  the  community 
showed  signs  of  regarding  the  Army  policy  in 
this  regard  as  a  beau  geste  and  nothing  more,  it 
was  made  to  realize  that  while  the  War  De- 
partment could  not  compel  the  community  to 
mend  its  ways,  it  could  and  would  move  the 
camp  in  twenty-four  hours  to  a  more  wholesome 
environment.  I  am  proud  to  say  that  it  was 
necessary  in  only  a  very  few  instances  to  bring 
forward  this  aspect  of  the  situation,  but  when  it 
was  necessary  the  Department  spoke  in  no 
uncertain  tone. 

As  a  result  of  this  general  policy,  in  which 
the  Navy  shared,  many  a  wide-open  town 
received  a  thorough  house  cleaning  for  the  first 
time  in  its  career;  in  all  between  120  and  140 
red  light  districts  were  closed  and  kept  closed; 
and  the  underlying  sordidness  of  many  a  smug 
self-satisfied  village  was  brought  to  light  and 
remedied. 

The  men  who  came  to  the  camps  tainted  with 
venereal  disease  or  broken  by  drink  or  mor- 
phine —  and  the  number  of  these  was  great 
enough  to  shock  our  national  complacency  (and 
incidentally  to  explode  the  national  assumption 
that  the  country  is  primarily  the  abode  of 

12 


THE  AMERICAN  SOLDIER 

virtue  as  the  city  is  of  vice)  —  these  men  were 
salvaged  by  the  tens  of  thousands  and  turned 
into  useful  self-respecting  soldiers  and  citizens. 

The  lesson  of  clean  living  was  taught  by  the 
spoken  word,  by  the  moving  picture,  by  the 
printed  page,  by  the  doctor  with  a  scientific 
thoroughness  and  by  the  layman  with  a  frank- 
ness and  sometimes  a  colloquialism  which  would 
for  once  have  rendered  Mrs.  Grundy  speechless. 
As  an  instrument  of  virtue,  the  tract  is,  of 
course,  of  time-honored  usage,  but  the  name  of 
George  Ade  in  the  list  of  tract  writers  is  a  new 
and  significant  one. 

More  important  than  all  this,  however,  in 
my  judgment,  was  the  realization  by  the  Army 
of  the  great  truth  that  the  soldier  —  or  any 
one  else  for  that  matter  —  goes  astray  in  only 
the  rarest  instances  from  innate  depravity. 
What  he  seeks  primarily  is  relaxation  and 
amusement.  And  so  wholesome  relaxation  and 
amusement  were  placed  at  his  disposal  to  take 
the  place  of  the  unwholesome.  The  whole 
nation  rose  to  help  in  this  work  of  substituting 
the  clean  for  the  unclean.  It  poured  its  money 
by  the  hundreds  of  millions  into  the  coffers  of 
the  great  welfare  societies,  the  Red  Cross,  The 
Young  Men's  Christian  Association,  Knights  of 

13 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

Columbus,  Jewish  Welfare  Board,  and  later, 
in  recognition  of  its  work  abroad,  the  Salvation 
Army.  All  of  these  vied  with  one  another  in  a 
rivalry  which  was  sometimes  embarrassing  in 
its  intensity.  The  American  Library  Associa- 
tion supplied  books  and  other  reading  matter, 
and  the  War  Camp  Community  Service  made 
sure  that,  to  the  towns  and  villages  surround- 
ing it,  a  cantonment  presented  an  opportunity 
for  service  rather  than  for  exploitation.  Not 
the  least  important  factor  in  the  superb  showing 
which  our  troops  made  in  France  was  the  spirit 
with  which  the  men  and  women  of  these  same 
towns  inspired  the  men  from  the  training  camps 
whom  they  took  into  their  homes  and  their 
hearts. 

Within  the  fabric  of  the  Army  the  chaplains 
were  doing  their  share,  as  were  the  athletic 
leaders  and  song  leaders  and  dramatic  coaches. 
They  were  seconded  by  the  officers  of  the  line, 
most  of  whom,  it  should  be  said,  saw  the  mili- 
tary usefulness  of  the  whole  program  from  the 
first,  many  of  the  experienced  regulars  having 
always  done  what  they  could  with  the  limited 
means  at  their  command  along  the  same  lines. 
Other  officers,  however,  had  to  be  shown  - 
and  were  shown  —  the  military  importance  of 

14 


THE  AMERICAN   SOLDIER 

the  truth  that  the  merry  heart  goes  all  the  day, 
and  the  sad  one  tires  in  a  mile. 

The  work  of  planning  and  coordination  was 
in  the  hands  of  the  civilian  Commission  on 
Training  Camp  Activities,  of  which  Mr.  Fosdick 
has  been  from  the  first  the  Chairman.  The 
work  of  this  Commission  has  been  characterized 
from  the  outset  by  a  courage  and  resourceful- 
ness for  which  no  praise  can  be  too  high.  The 
theatre  for  example  has  not  always  been  looked 
upon  by  the  American  people  as  a  moral  agency, 
but  the  Commission  saw  its  place  in  the  scheme 
of  things  and  no  fewer  than  thirty-seven  great 
playhouses  have  been  erected  at  the  camps  and 
the  audiences  have  run  literally  into  the  mil- 
lions. Boxing  likewise  was  encouraged,  even 
though  some  of  the  contests  which  resulted 
were  not  of  the  most  gentle.  Cantonment 
towns  were  persuaded  to  open  the  " Movies" 
on  Sunday,  the  only  day  on  which  most  soldiers 
could  leave  the  Camp  —  the  outcries  of  the 
unco  guid  to  the  contrary  notwithstanding. 

For  more  than  a  year  the  Commission  and 
the  welfare  organizations  were  the  only  or- 
ganized forces  in  this  general  field,  but  since 
last  summer  their  work  has  been  supplemented 
by  the  establishment  within  the  Army  itself 

15 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

of  a  Morale  Branch  of  the  General  Staff,  in 
the  formation  of  which  the  Department  was 
not  too  proud  to  take  a  leaf  —  perhaps  one 
should  say  a  Blatt  —  from  the  Germans,  who 
had  already  developed  this  type  of  organization 
to  a  high  degree,  under  the  direct  supervision 
of  General  Ludendorff. 

I  have  spoken  of  the  work  of  prevention,  of 
the  more  important  work  of  substitution,  and 
I  now  come  to  the  most  important  of  all  — 
the  spirit  of  confidence  which  extended  from 
top  to  bottom  of  the  huge  organization  that  the 
great  mass  of  our  men  would  go  straight  for 
the  sake  of  going  straight.  We  all  instinctively 
couple  the  two  words,  " officer"  and  "gentleman." 
In  the  great  Army  which  is  now  being  dis- 
banded, its  work  having  been  so  gloriously 
done,  we  find  a  new  and  enlarged  conception, 
that  of  the  soldier  and  gentleman.  It  was,  I 
am  certain,  the  preliminary  assumption  that 
an  American  soldier  was  also  an  American 
gentleman  in  all  the  fundamentals  of  that  much- 
abused  term,  which  was  the  great  factor  in 
keeping  down  the  number  of  those  who  proved 
the  contrary  to  so  negligibly  small  a  total. 

A  few  figures  from  the  official  records  will 
16 


THE  AMERICAN  SOLDIER 

show  what  the  result  of  this  all  has  been.  In 
1909,  for  instance,  there  were  in  the  Army,  in 
round  numbers,  5500  court-martial  convictions 
of  enlisted  men,  out  of  a  total  of  75,000.  For 
the  fifteen  months  ending  July  1,  1918,  there 
were  11,500  convictions  out  of  a  total  of  2,200,000 
enlisted  men,  the  percentage  in  the  twelve 
months  of  peace  being  7.3  and  in  the  fifteen 
months  of  war,  .53,  about  one-fourteenth  as 
great.  The  significance  of  these  later  figures 
cannot  be  appreciated  without  some  knowledge 
of  the  underlying  circumstances.  One  case  I 
remember  was  that  of  a  man  who  got  drunk, 
spent  his  money  and  that  of  some  fellow  soldiers, 
and  stayed  absent  without  leave  to  earn  money 
enough  to  repay  his  fellow  soldiers  and  then 
returned  to  camp  to  take  his  medicine.  What 
on  the  surface  appears  to  be  the  cowardly  crime 
of  desertion  was,  in  several  instances  of  which 
I  have  personal  knowledge,  a  misguided  effort 
to  get  to  the  front,  through  enlistment  under 
another  name  in  some  branch  of  the  service 
which  seemed  to  have  an  earlier  prospect  of 
getting  over.  In  France  there  were  many 
cases  of  desertion,  but  nearly  all  were  from  the 
rear  to  the  front.  The  progressive  success  of 
the  policy  of  keeping  the  soldier  from  strong 

17 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

drink,  by  the  way,  stands  out  in  the  figures, 
which  show  that  early  in  the  war  one  out  of 
every  twelve  offenses  charged  included  drunk- 
enness, but  that  this  proportion  dropped  until 
the  final  figures  were  less  than  one  in  each  thirty 
offenses,  this  including  soldiers  in  France,  where 
the  soldier  had  to  stand  on  his  own  feet  unpro- 
tected by  prohibition  laws. 

The  welfare  program  was,  from  the  nature  of 
the  case,  most  effective  among  the  men  of  the 
National  Army,  where  it  was  possible  to  take 
the  soldiers  in  hand  from  the  first.  If  we 
analyze  the  court-martial  records,  we  find  that 
the  proportion  of  court-martials  was  distinctly 
lowest  in  this  group.  The  records  as  of  June  30, 
1918,  show  that  the  number  of  court-martials 
among  the  Regular  Army  was  a  little  less  than 
one  per  cent,  to  be  accurate  YO  of  one  per  cent; 
in  the  National  Guard  the  proportion  was  about 
-fto  of  one  per  cent;  and  in  the  National  Army 
it  was  less  than  -£$  of  one  per  cent,  the  exact 
figure  being  .143  per  cent,  one-fiftieth  of  the 
percentage  ten  years  ago. 

Another  check  on  the  efficiency  of  the  pro- 
gram is  found  in  the  records  as  to  venereal 
disease  in  the  Surgeon  General's  Office.  It  is 
hard  to  get  comparative  figures  because  of  con- 

18 


THE  AMERICAN  SOLDIER 

stantly  changing  conditions,  but  it  has  been 
shown  beyond  all  doubt  that  the  health  con- 
ditions in  the  Army  have  been  far,  far  better 
than  in  the  community  at  large.  While  the 
latter  are  not  so  bad  as  the  alarmists  have  im- 
plied, they  are  serious  enough  in  all  conscience, 
when  in  no  fewer  than  seventeen  of  the  states, 
sixty  or  more  of  every  thousand  men  who 
appeared  at  the  mobilization  camps  were  found 
to  be  infected.  Taking  a  typical  month  before 
the  signing  of  the  armistice,  we  find  that  the 
proportion  of  cases  coming  to  the  camps  from 
the  civil  community  was  fifteen  times  as  great  as 
the  proportion  among  our  soldiers  in  France, 
even  including  the  soldiers  in  the  port  towns, 
where  most  of  our  difficulties  there  were 
found.  The  comparison  with  the  records  of 
the  cantonments  in  this  country  is  even  more 
striking. 

As  to  the  purely  religious  appeal  and  its 
influence  on  the  men  it  is  hard  to  speak  with 
any  degree  of  certainty.  A  visiting  British 
general  in  Washington,  shortly  after  our  entry 
into  the  war,  was  asked  as  to  conditions  in 
England,  and  is  reported  to  have  replied,  "Upon 
my  soul,  if  you  ask  me,  I  should  say  that  with 

19 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

us  the  dear  old  Church  has  rather  missed  the 
bus."  In  this  country  the  organized  religious 
forces  have  by  no  means  missed  the  bus,  but 
if  we  are  honest  with  ourselves  we  must  face 
the  fact  that  since  the  last  great  national  test, 
the  Civil  War,  other  appeals  to  higher  standards 
of  conduct  have  both  actually  and  relatively 
been  tremendously  strengthened,  and  our  re- 
ligious leaders  must  address  themselves,  in  the 
light  of  experience  during  these  past  two  years, 
to  a  clearer  understanding  of  these  other  forces 
and  to  a  closer  cooperation  with  them.  We 
cannot  to-day  close  our  eyes  to  the  truth  that 
many  of  our  finest  men  played  their  splendid 
parts  quite  untouched  by  a  religious  motive 
or  appeal  —  or  at  least  doctrinal  appeal;  one 
hesitates  to  call  their  attitude  a  non-religious 
one.  It  must  always  be  remembered,  however, 
that  their  standards,  no  matter  how  unconscious 
they  may  have  been  of  the  fact,  were  funda- 
mentally based  upon  the  development  of  a  Chris- 
tian civilization. 

If  thus  far  I  may  have  seemed  to  measure 
soldier  conduct  by  two  standards  only,  by  his 
relation  to  drink  and  to  women,  it  is  because 
the  results  of  the  policy  of  the  Army  in  these 
two  matters  are  measurable,  the  records  are 

20 


THE  AMERICAN   SOLDIER 

outstanding.  The  Army  and  its  experience 
however  would  furnish  but  a  poor  guide  to  the 
Churches  and  the  other  civilian  forces  for 
righteousness  if  its  lessons  were  limited  to  the 
negative  virtues,  important  as  they  are,  of 
sobriety  and  continence. 

The  real  contribution,  what  we  have  learned 
as  to  the  positive  virtues,  is  harder  to  describe 
and  impossible  to  measure,  but  the  lessons  are 
worth  looking  for  and  may  be  learned  from  the 
letters  and  from  the  lips  of  our  men.  Perhaps 
I  can  best  indicate  what  the  men  themselves 
regard  as  vital  by  telling  the  experience  of  a 
friend  who  started  one  of  the  customary  prac- 
tical talks  before  an  audience  of  our  men  be- 
hind the  lines  in  France.  His  homily  didn't 
seem  to  be  "  getting  across "  and  he  was  inspired 
to  ascertain  just  what  to  their  minds  were  the 
most  serious  offenses.  He  asked  each  man  to 
write  down  what  he  regarded  as  the  three  very 
worst  faults  against  which  a  soldier  should  be 
on  his  guard.  When  the  answers  were  col- 
lected, one  word  appeared  on  practically  every 
slip  of  paper,  cowardice;  the  second  was  not 
so  nearly  unanimous,  but  appears  on  a  strong 
majority  of  the  papers,  selfishness;  and  the 
third  was  evidently  conceitedness,  though  the 

21 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

defect    was   worded   in   different   ways,    as   big 
head,  crust,  and  the  like. 

In  other  words,  the  virtues  which  the  soldier 
most  admires  and  regarding  which  he  had  evi- 
dently learned  the  most  valuable  lessons,  are 
courage,  unselfishness  or  cooperativeness,  and 
modesty. 

The  record  of  our  soldiers  has  proved  beyond 
a  doubt  that  once  you  get  men  into  groups 
with  a  common  and  a  worth-while  purpose, 
courage  —  both  the  reckless  courage  that  comes 
by  instinct  and  that  higher  type,  the  courage 
of  the  man  who  recognizes  his  danger  —  can 
no  longer  be  assumed  to  be  a  rare  virtue.  It 
is  a  very  common  virtue.  Cowardice  is  in- 
finitely rarer.  The  citations  and  the  casualty 
records,  for  instance,  have  completely  rehabili- 
tated the  Jew  as  a  fighting  man,  and  the  faith- 
ful need  no  longer  go  back  to  Josephus  for  their 
war  legends. 

Not  all  the  courage  and  fortitude  was  shown  on 
the  field  of  battle.  We  must  not  forget  that  last 
fall  we  suffered  from  by  far  the  most  serious  epi- 
demic in  the  history  of  America,  and,  in  the 
dark  days  in  our  training  camps,  opportunities 
were  offered,  and  gladly  accepted,  for  a  display 
of  heroism  and  devotion  of  the  highest  type. 

22 


THE  AMERICAN   SOLDIER 

In  the  realm  of  fortitude,  if  not  of  physical 
courage,  the  war  certainly  tapped  new  sources 
of  determination  and  provided  a  kind  of  stimu- 
lus which  would  keep  a  man  to  whom  no  per- 
sonal glory  or  conspicuousness  could  possibly 
come,  some  poor  devil  sentenced  to  a  swivel 
chair,  laboring  in  that  same  chair  day  and 
night  for  the  purpose  of  making  some  single 
improvement  in  nut  or  bolt,  or  perhaps  filing 
card.  Given  the  impetus  of  a  great  common 
purpose,  our  possibilities  for  industry  are 
limitless. 

One  thing  that  mankind  should  have  learned 
long  since  is  that,  broadly  speaking,  selfishness 
as  a  guiding  motive  is  essentially  negative  - 
the  absence  of  something  better  —  the  man  is 
a  rare  exception  who  does  not  lose  himself  and 
his  self-interest  in  the  conception  or  the  am- 
bition of  the  group,  the  squad  or  battalion  or 
regiment,  the  division,  the  army  or  the  nation. 
An  interesting  side-light  upon  this  is  the  fact 
that  two-thirds  of  the  men  who  get  into  trouble 
in  the  Army,  or  at  any  rate  who  get  into  suffi- 
ciently serious  trouble  to  land  them  in  Fort 
Leavenworth,  are  markedly  of  the  ego-centric 
type;  in  other  words,  are  men  for  whom  the 
group  cannot  overcome  the  individual  bias. 

23 


SOME  WAR-TIME   LESSONS 

That  our  soldiers  as  a  whole  possess  the 
virtue  of  modesty,  though  it  is  often  overlaid 
by  a  veneer  of  innocent  swagger,  is  beyond 
dispute,  as  any  one  who  has  had  to  do  with 
them  can  testify.  And  underlying  and  inspir- 
ing their  whole  conduct  have  been  the  qualities 
of  whole-souledness  and  determination  and  an 
indomitable  cheerfulness. 

We  must  learn  the  lessons  which  the  soldiers 
have  to  teach  us  in  the  large  just  as  we  must 
grasp  their  accomplishments  in  the  large.  There 
is  a  morning  after  for  nations  as  well  as  for  in- 
dividuals, and  we  seem  just  now  to  be  in  danger 
of  losing  our  conception  of  the  greatness  of  the 
enterprise,  and  its  essential  soundness,  through 
the  intrusion  of  the  instances,  relatively  very 
few,  where  things  did  not  go  right;  where 
human  nature  did  not  reach  the  heights,  or 
having  reached  them,  failed  to  remain  upon 
them. 

It  has,  I  think,  been  definitely  proved  that  the 
mixing  up  of  the  so-called  welfare  work  with 
the  special  function  of  the  clergymen  or  other 
religious  adviser,  in  order  that  the  latter  may 
be  made  more  palatable  to  the  soldier,  has  an 
effect  exactly  the  reverse  of  what  was  intended. 

24 


THE   AMERICAN   SOLDIER 

The  policy  of  interpolating  a  prayer  meeting, 
or  a  heart-to-heart  talk,  between  the  third  and 
fourth  reels  of  the  moving  picture  play,  and  I 
grieve  to  say  that  such  a  policy  was  actually 
followed  for  a  while,  is  of  course  a  fantastic 
example,  but  it  shows  exactly  how  we  ought  not 
to  do  it. 

The  soldiers  are  peculiarly  sensitive  to  any 
feeling  that  what  is  done  for  them  is  done  for 
some  other  purpose  than  the  ostensible  one, 
entirely  apart  from  how  worthy  such  other 
purpose  may  be.  Let  me  quote  from  a  letter 
written  by  an  officer  of  the  Army  who  had  been 
visiting  a  number  of  camps: 

"The  Camp  Library  to  my  mind  fulfills  one 
of  the  most  vital  needs  of  the  camp.  It  is  a 
place  where  our  men  can  get  relaxation  and 
mental  stimulus,  and  where  they  can  feel  at 
ease  without  the  *  God-bless-you '  atmosphere 
of  the  other  welfare  organizations.".  .  .  "It 
is  the  one  place  in  camp  where  you  can  go  and 
have  a  chance  to  meditate  or  read  in  peace  and 
quiet  without  a  piano  jangling  in  your  ears  or 
the  imminent  possibility  of  a  prayer  meeting." 

The  chaplain  or  the  lay  religious  worker  to 
whom  a  man  instinctively  turned  at  the  moment 
when  he  needed  spiritual  help  was  the  one 

25 


SOME  WAR-TIME   LESSONS 

whom  he  had  learned  to  respect  for  courage  and 
devotion  and  dignity,  the  man  who  had  helped 
to  bury  his  dead  friend,  to  comfort  and  amuse 
his  wounded  friend,  and  to  advise  his  mis- 
guided friend  in  the  guard-house;  not  the  one 
whose  ill-timed  ministrations  he  had  learned 
to  avoid.  I  understand  that  the  story  of  the 
chaplain  who  entirely  forgot  that  he  was  to 
appear  at  a  review  for  the  purpose  of  receiving 
a  medal  and  delayed  the  entire  proceedings 
while  he  was  sought  for  and  found  in  his  cus- 
tomary post  in  the  connecting  trench,  is  abso- 
lutely authentic. 

The  man  who  could  forget  his  denomination 
in  his  devotion  to  the  great  common  mission 
was  the  man  whom  the  soldier  learned  to  love 
and  to  trust  and  who  could  do  the  most  in  the 
day  of  battle.  The  most  popular  tales  among 
the  chaplains  are  the  tales  of  un orthodoxy: 
The  Catholic  priest  who  baptized  a  group  of 
his  men  before  action  in  a  shell  hole  with  water 
which  was  not  only  unblessed,  but  I  fear  un- 
sanitary, and  who  simply  referred  to  Philip 
and  the  Eunuch  when  reproved;  the  Methodist 
and  Baptist,  and  I  think  the  Episcopalian,  who 
in  the  absence  of  their  Presbyterian  colleague, 
solemnly  and  quite  illegally  received  a  youngster 

26 


THE  AMERICAN  SOLDIER 

into  the  Presbyterian  fold  before  he  went  over- 
seas, and  confessed  the  next  morning  to  the 
Presbyterian  Board;  the  Wesleyan  chaplain  in 
the  British  Army  who  carried  a  crucifix  to  com- 
fort the  dying  Catholics  on  the  battlefield  when 
no  priest  of  their  faith  was  near,  and  who 
administered  the  last  rites  to  them  as  best  he 
could.  There  are  hundreds  of  such  stories. 

The  appeal  of  any  denomination  as  such,  or 
of  the  Y,  or  the  corresponding  societies  of  other 
faiths,  as  such,  was  always  mistaken.  It  was 
the  united  appeal  of  all  the  doers  of  good  deeds 
which  counted.  If  we  never  knew  before,  we 
know  now  the  truth  of  the  fable  of  the  bundle 
of  fagots.  Personally,  I  believe  the  united  drive 
for  welfare  work  last  fall,  during  which  Protest- 
ant, Catholic  and  Jew,  and  men  of  no  formal 
religion  whatever,  appealed  from  the  same  plat- 
form for  the  same  great  purpose,  was  an  event 
of  the  greatest  importance  in  our  nation,  and  it 
will  go  ill  with  us  if  we  forget  the  lesson  that 
it  has  to  teach. 

The  appeal  must  be  not  only  disinterested, 
but  it  must  be  simple  and  direct.  This,  and  the 
careful  selection  of  its  personnel,  had  much, 
if  not  most,  to  do  with  the  extraordinary  suc- 
cess of  the  Salvation  Army.  There  are  times 

27 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

in  a  soldier's  life  when  the  sewing  on  of  a 
button  at  some  vital  spot  will  do  more  to  "get" 
him  than  anything  else  in  the  world. 

Out  of  this  spirit  of  general  helpfulness,  there 
were  developed  at  almost  every  point  the  most 
beautiful  and  sympathetic  adjustments  to  im- 
mediate conditions.  For  example,  take  the 
plan  of  showing  moving  pictures  upon  the  ceil- 
ings of  hospital  wards,  so  that  the  very  ill  may 
enjoy  them  without  the  strain  even  of  raising 
their  heads.  This  small  piece  of  thoughtfulness 
to  me  represents  the  standard  of  thinking  a 
problem  through  which  we  will  have  to  main- 
tain if  we  are  to  hold  what  we  have  gained, 
and  what  we  have  gained  includes,  or  should 
include,  a  realization  that  active  and  willing 
loving-kindness  furnishes  the  keenest  of  all 
pleasures. 

Thus  far  I  have  spoken  mainly  of  the  work  of 
preparation  in  the  United  States.  Overseas 
our  soldiers  and  their  officers  found  new  condi- 
tions and  were  forced  to  make  new  adjustments. 
We  no  longer  could  control  the  laws  and  ordi- 
nances, and  we  found  different  standards  of 
conduct  —  not  necessarily  lower  standards,  but 
different  standards.  We  could  no  longer  en- 

28 


THE  AMERICAN   SOLDIER 

force  prohibition  for  example,  but  we  did  main- 
tain a  high  average  of  temperance.  We  showed 
our  allies,  some  of  whom  I  may  say  were  hon- 
estly sceptical  on  the  subject,  that  with  our 
soldiers  continence  was  the  rule,  and  not  the 
exception.  When  I  was  in  France  last  year, 
I  asked  those  who  were  in  a  position  to  know 
upon  this  point  and  was  told  that,  comparatively 
speaking,  very,  very  few  of  our  men  lowered  in 
France  the  standards  of  conduct  which  they 
held  when  they  came  into  the  Army,  that  many 
more  greatly  improved  those  standards,  either 
because  of  the  lessons  they  had  learned  in  our 
training  camps,  or  because  of  the  wholesome 
companionship  of  the  women  workers  with 
whom  they  were  daily  brought  in  contact,  or 
because,  and  this  was  probably  the  most  potent 
factor  of  all,  they  were  so  desperately  keen  to 
get  into  the  fighting  line  that  they  were  taking 
no  chances  of  being  put  out  of  commission 
beforehand.  Their  morality  was  the  morality 
of  the  team  in  training  for  the  big  game,  and  it 
kept  tens  of  thousands  of  boys  straight.  Indeed, 
until  November  11,  disciplinary  problems  may 
be  said  to  have  been  practically  non-existent 
among  combat  troops  and  almost  negligible 
among  the  others.  After  the  armistice  was 

29 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

signed,  there  was  a  let-down,  this  being  after 
all  a  very  human  body  of  young  men,  and  the 
first  remedy  tried  by  some  of  the  old-time 
regulars  did  not  help  a  bit.  This  was  to  "give 
'em  plenty  of  drill  and  make  'em  so  tired  they 
won't  have  energy  to  get  into  mischief,"  but 
as  one  returning  artillery  officer  pointed  out  to 
me,  when  a  battery  a  month  before  has  fired 
50,000  rounds  of  high-explosive  at  the  Boche, 
and  worked  its  guns  over  craters  and  through 
thickets,  a  drill  with  dummy  ammunition  on  a 
parade  ground  is  almost  a  justification  for 
mutiny.  Wiser  counsel  soon  prevailed  and  the 
welfare  work,  which  had  slumped  with  the  rest, 
was  again  brought  up  to  concert  pitch.  It  was 
for  the  first  time  in  France,  properly  coordinated 
under  Army  control.  The  misfits  and  the 
workers  who  had  worn  themselves  out  were 
returned  to  this  country  and  their  places  taken 
by  fresh  blood.  I  remember  in  this  connection 
a  paragraph  tucked  in  the  middle  of  the  un- 
compromising officialdom  of  the  daily  depart- 
mental cable:  "Send  over  plenty  of  welfare 
workers  and  remember  the  best  men  you  can 
send  are  the  women." 

Let  me  take  this  chance  to  say  a  word  about 
the    criticisms   we   have    been   hearing    of    this 

30 


THE  AMERICAN   SOLDIER 

welfare  work  abroad.  In  the  first  place,  the 
success  of  the  work  in  this  country  among  the 
men  in  training  set  up  an  expectation  which 
it  was  humanly  impossible  to  meet  under  the 
conditions  overseas;  in  other  words,  the  men 
who  went  over  assumed  standards  as  to  the 
minimum  amount  of  attention  which  it  was 
their  right  to  expect,  the  like  of  which  had 
never  been  dreamed  in  the  history  of  mankind. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  and  taken  as  a  whole,  the 
treatment  which  they  received  was  admirable 
and  the  comparatively  few  who  now  doubt  the 
truth  of  this  statement  will  come  to  realize  it 
as  time  goes  on.  They  will  see  that  the  mis- 
fits, the  over-wrought,  stood  out  in  their  minds 
like  men  out  of  alignment  at  parade,  that  they 
simply  did  not  notice  the  thousands  of  men 
and  women  whose  work  for  them  was  all  that 
their  own  mothers  could  have  asked. 

The  following  official  cablegram  records  the 
state  of  educational,  recreation  and  welfare 
work  at  the  end  of  April,  1919. 

" Educational  activities:  Roughly  there  are 
209,000  students  embraced  in  this  scheme.  Ten 
thousand  are  at  A.E.F.  University  at  Beaune, 
some  7,000  are  attending  French  universities. 
3,000  attending  British.  There  are  roughly 

31 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

130,000  men  at  Post  Schools,  which  correspond 
to  our  elementary  schools  in  United  States. 
55,000  are  attending  the  Divisional  Educational 
Schools,  which  correspond  to  our  High  schools. 
In  addition  there  are  approximately  58,000  men 
in  specialized  vocational  schools  where  they 
have  full  shop  facilities  of  A.E.F. 

" Athletic  activities:  Athletic  activities  in- 
creasing daily  in  scope  and  popularity.  Figures 
for  February  show  6,500,000  individual  par- 
ticipants in  games.  In  addition  to  mass  ath- 
letics, unit  championships  are  being  played  in 
football,  basketball,  soccer,  boxing,  tennis,  swim- 
ming, tug  of  war,  golf,  track  and  field. 

"Entertainment  activities:  Reports  of  enter- 
tainment officers  show  monthly  attendance  for 
A.E.F.  of  between  eight  and  ten  million.  Mov- 
ing pictures,  professional  talent  from  United 
States  and  particularly  soldier  shows  being 
utilized  in  all  parts  of  army  and  have  done  much 
to  take  care  of  leisure  hours  of  troops.  Horse 
shows  have  been  held  in  nearly  every  division 
of  A.E.F.  and  have  proved  very  popular. 
Amount  of  all  this  work  now  being  carried  on 
is  little  short  of  stupendous." 

The  following  paragraphs  from  a  personal 
letter  are  particularly  significant  as  coming  from 

32 


THE  AMERICAN  SOLDIER 

an  officer  of  the  regular  army,  who  when  he 
was  in  command  of  one  of  the  cantonments 
in  the  United  States  was  genuinely  alarmed 
lest  the  War  Department  had  not  lost  its  sense 
of  proportion,  and  was  creating  parlor  ornaments 
instead  of  fighting  men : 

"I  served  in  the  Army  of  Occupation  in  the 
Philippines  and  in  China  after  the  Boxer  cam- 
paign, and  I  want  to  tell  you  that  the  disci- 
pline and  esprit  de  corps  of  these  troops  in 
Germany  is  incomparably  better  than  any- 
thing I  saw  there. 

"I  think  nothing  has  so  contributed  to  this 
result  as  the  welfare  work  and  the  educational 
work  undertaken.  We  have  every  reason  to 
be  proud  of  the  fact  that  we  had  people  in  com- 
mand of  the  army  who  had  the  vision  to  see 
what  result  this  work  would  bring. 

"I  took  command  of  the  — th  Division  in 
the  Army  of  Occupation  in  December,  and  up 
until  the  present  time  I  never  worked  with  a 
happier  or  more  contented  lot  of  men.  Of 
course  they  all  want  to  go  home,  and  we  wouldn't 
have  much  use  for  them  if  they  didn't,  but  an 
intensified  military  course  of  training  in  the 
morning,  schools  and  athletics  in  the  afternoon, 
and  study  and  entertainment  in  the  evening 

33 


SOME  WAR-TIME   LESSONS 

have  made  their  days  so  full  that  they  have 
been  perfectly  contented  to  stay  until  their 
boat  comes  in  June. 

"This  has  been  the  experience  of  all  the 
divisions  up  here  in  Germany,  and  their  en- 
thusiasm, I  fear,  when  they  get  home,  may  be 
taken  for  pro-Germanism." 

The  War  Department  has  learned  so  much 
in  this  great  laboratory  experiment  in  human 
conduct  that  the  impious  wish  sometimes  arises 
in  one's  mind  that  we  might  promptly  try  it 
all  over  again  for  the  chance  of  profiting  by  our 
mistakes.  Thank  God  we  can't  do  that,  but 
in  our  daily  contact  with  these  same  men 
restored  to  their  communities  we  can  to  a  certain 
degree  carry  on  the  work,  and  in  so  doing  we 
can  learn  much  from  the  successes  and  failures 
of  the  Army. 

In  planning  for  the  immediate  future,  there 
are  some  things  which  we  mustn't  forget.  In 
the  first  place,  we  mustn't  expect  these  young 
men  (or  any  humans  for  that  matter)  to  be 
capable  of  remaining  at  concert  pitch  indefinitely. 

For  a  while,  in  dealing  with  the  soldier  who 
has  returned  from  overseas,  real  ingenuity  will 
be  required  to  make  much  impression  upon  his 

34 


THE  AMERICAN   SOLDIER 

mind.  Not  only  will  ordinary  life  seem  tame 
but,  frankly,  he  is  likely  to  have  been  over- 
handled  and  overwelfared.  If,  however,  we 
have  erred  in  this  regard,  it  has  been  on  the 
right  side. 

May  I  venture  still  another  suggestion,  and 
that  is  to  be  careful  and  considerate  of  the 
soldier  who,  despite  his  earnest  desire,  failed 
to  get  across,  and  for  the  matter  of  that,  of  the 
young  man  who  didn't  get  into  the  Army  at 
all.  The  morale  of  these  two  groups  will  need 
our  particular  care. 

In  closing,  however,  we  should  not  end  upon 
a  note  of  warning,  but  rather  upon  one  of 
exultation;  for  the  war  has  taught  us,  if  it  has 
taught  nothing  else,  that,  given  a  great  cause 
and  a  cross-section  of  our  heterogeneous  Ameri- 
can population,  the  resulting  revelation  of  the 
power  of  human  endurance,  human  courage  and 
human  accomplishment  comes  pretty  near  to- 
proving  objectively  the  divinity  of  man. 


35 


THE  WAR  AS  A  PRACTICAL  TEST  OF 
AMERICAN  SCHOLARSHIP1 

IT  is  a  difficult  task  to  attempt  to  define  the 
American  scholar  of  to-day.  If  any  of  you 
doubt  it,  let  him  try  it  as  I  have  tried.  Scholar- 
ship, like  many  another  broad  term,  has  no 
sharply  marked  edges.  It  is  hard  to  define 
anything  that  lacks  definiteness ;  and,  after  all, 
the  task  is  relatively  profitless,  because  we  all 
of  us  recognize  what  is  at  the  center  of  the 
concept.  I  think  we  all  recognize  that  the 
scholar  is  an  expert  in  some  particular  field  or 
fields;  but  he  is  more  than  the  expert  as  such, 
in  that  he  knows  enough  of  other  matters  to 
see  his  particular  specialty  hi  its  relation  to 
things  in  general.  He  must,  to  this  degree  at 
least,  be  a  philosopher.  This  very  general  con- 
ception of  scholarship  is  fairly  constant,  but  the 
fields  which  the  conception  includes  are  broad- 
ening day  by  day  and  almost  hour  by  hour. 

1  An  address  delivered  before  the  New  York  Delta  of  Phi  Beta 
Kappa  at  Columbia  University  upon  the  fiftieth  anniversary  of 
the  establishment  of  the  Chapter,  June  3,  1919, 

36 


A  PRACTICAL  TEST  OF  SCHOLARSHIP 

We  cannot  to-day  limit  scholarship  to  the  polite 
branches  which  were  all  that  it  embodied  when 
this  Society  was  founded  or  even  when  this 
Chapter  was  established.  The  scholar  of  the 
old-fashioned  type  must  now  accept  as  his 
fellow  the  man  who  has  helped  to  flatten  the 
trajectory  of  the  16-inch  shell,  or  to  control 
the  birth  rate  of  the  cootie.  Later  on  I  shall 
suggest  one  other  element  which,  in  the  light 
of  the  test  which  American  scholarship  has 
undergone  in  the  past  two  years,  it  seems  to 
me  should  now  be  included  in  our  idea  of  the 
typical  American  scholar. 

We  Americans  are  proud  of  being  called  a 
nation  of  inventors;  and  most  of  us  have  made, 
or  almost  made,  private  discoveries  of  an  in- 
ventional  nature  which,  for  some  reason,  have 
never  come  to  fruition.  The  scientific  boards 
in  Washington  during  the  war  received  more 
than  sixty  thousand  suggestions  in  some  mechan- 
ical field;  and  I  am  told  by  those  who  ought  to 
know  that  of  all  these  not  more  than  five  of 
those  coming  from  untrained  minds  were  of 
any  practical  value.  Even  from  the  trained 
minds  there  came,  I  am  told,  no  fundamental 
discovery  in  science  as  a  direct  result  of  the 
war  conditions.  Suggestions  of  improvements  in 

37 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

detail  and  valuable  suggestions  there  were  in 
plenty,  new  applications  of  known  principles, 
but  application  of  a  fundamentally  new  idea, 
no.  That  is  only  to  say  what  we  already  know, 
that  discovery  is  not  made  to  order.  In  each 
case  the  idea  had  already  been  born  in  the  mind 
of  some  intellectual  pioneer  and  worked  out 
by  him,  and  some  man  who  had  the  idea  in 
the  front  of  his  mind  was  at  hand  to  apply  it 
to  the  new  condition.  And  that  means,  I 
think,  that  if  we  met  the  test,  we  met  it  with 
our  scholars. 

When  the  test  came,  certain  fields  of  scholar- 
ship naturally  afforded  a  better  chance  for  im- 
mediate service  than  others.  The  chemist,  for 
example,  had  a  better  chance  a  thousand-fold 
than  the  archaeologist.  It  is  extraordinary,  how- 
ever, how  many  of  the  gifts  which  burned  bright 
on  the  national  altar  came  from  men  with  some 
out-of-the-way  specialty.  Take  archaeology  it- 
self, if  you  will.  The  best  trench  helmet  de- 
veloped during  the  war  was  designed  by  the 
expert  in  armor  from  our  own  academic  fellow- 
ship. I  am  told  that  a  very  important  element 
in  the  length  of  time  which  it  took  to  control 
the  submarine  menace  was  the  fact  that  when 
war  broke  out  the  science  of  oceanography  was 

38 


A  PRACTICAL  TEST  OF  SCHOLARSHIP 

almost  wholly  in  the  hands  of  the  Germans. 
When  the  world's  supply  of  cocoanut  husks 
was  taken  up  for  gas  masks  and  we  still  needed 
charcoal,  we  had  to  turn  for  additional  sources 
to  the  tropical  botanist,  who  might  have  been 
expected  to  remain  reasonably  undisturbed. 
It  remained  for  a  scholar  in  perhaps  the  purest 
branch  of  pure  science,  astronomy,  to  recognize 
the  well  known  fact  that  it  is  the  shape  of  the 
tail  of  any  and  every  moving  object,  motor 
car  or  boat  or  what  you  will,  and  not  the  shape 
of  the  head,  which  is  the  factor  of  chief  impor- 
tance in  design,  and  to  apply  this  recognition  to 
artillery  problems.  The  re-designing  of  our 
artillery  shells  under  the  direction  of  this  as- 
tronomer added  miles  to  their  range.  Another 
astronomer  applied  his  experience  in  studying 
the  movement  of  comets  to  solving  certain 
problems  of  long-range  artillery  fire  where  the 
projectile  in  its  flight  rises  into  the  circum- 
ambient ether. 

In  proving  the  case  for  the  American  scholar, 
as  I  think  we  can  prove  it,  we  should  not  be 
beguiled  into  the  pleasant  task  of  recording 
the  deeds  of  scholars  and  gentlemen  when  the 
deeds  were  those  of  the  gallant  gentleman 
rather  than  of  the  scholar  per  se.  We  have 

39 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

one  here  in  our  own  academic  family  whose 
lieutenant's  bars  I  should  be  as  proud  to  wear 
as  the  stars  of  any  of  our  generals.  Nor  need 
we,  I  think,  cite  the  instances  where  the  rigorous 
training  of  the  scholar  clearly  laid  the  founda- 
tion for  great  accomplishment  in  some  general 
field  of  administration.  The  man  whom  we 
can  thank  perhaps  more  than  any  other  for  the 
brilliant  conduct  of  our  war  finance  was  seven- 
teen years  ago  editor-in-chief  of  the  Columbia 
Law  Review.  We  may  well  turn  with  pride, 
but  we  don't  need  him  to  prove  our  point,  to 
the  scholar  of  this  university,  formerly  president 
of  this  Chapter,  who,  from  his  own  talents  and 
experience  and  his  alert  sense  of  scholarship 
in  others,  has  earned  the  place  which  he  now 
holds  as  educational  director  of  the  largest  uni- 
versity in  the  world,  the  A.E.F.  University  at 
Beaune. 

Our  case  rests,  as  I  say,  upon  the  direct  ap- 
plications of  scholarship,  and  not  only  upon 
their  quality,  but  on  their  range.  A  single 
division  of  the  National  Research  Council,  in 
its  report  for  1918,  showed  work  of  national 
significance  by  the  scholars  in  physics,  mathe- 
matics, and  allied  fields  toward  the  solution 

40 


A  PRACTICAL  TEST  OF  SCHOLARSHIP 

of  no  fewer  than  sixty-eight  different  problems, 
every  one  of  which  needed  for  its  solution  men 
with  training  and  knowledge  and  vision.  At 
the  outset,  who  among  us  had  the  slightest  con- 
ception of  the  complexity  of  the  adaptations 
to  warfare  of  what  was  known  to  modern 
scholarship?  We  knew  that  the  war  was  mount- 
ing into  the  air,  but  who  had  any  realization  of 
the  adjustments  which  this  involved?  Fifteen 
fundamental  problems  based  on  pure  physics 
promptly  arose  with  reference  to  instruments 
for  airplane  operation.  For  example,  at  night 
and  in  the  clouds,  the  aviator  must  have  before 
his  eyes  a  dial  which  will  indicate  the  slightest 
deviation  from  his  course.  Seven  problems  had 
to  do  with  airplane  photography.  As  the  art 
of  camouflage  advanced,  for  instance,  color  filters 
had  to  be  devised  for  its  detection  from  above. 
Seven  additional  problems  had  to  do  with  fac- 
tors of  construction  and  maintenance,  as  fuel 
efficiency.  Nine  others  affected  ballooning ;  and 
the  balloon,  as  the  war  developed,  came  to  be  of 
greater  and  greater  importance.  Eleven  studies 
were  in  signalling:  one,  for  example,  a  device 
for  secret  daylight  signalling,  with  a  range  of 
five  miles  or  more.  And  please  remember  that 
all  these  were  the  task  of  one  branch  of  one 

41 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

organization  within  the  field  of  pure  science. 
By  common  consent,  the  dullest  branch  of 
physics  was  held  to  be  acoustics,  but  since  1914 
the  whole  question  of  sound-ranging  has  been 
in  the  hands  of  experts  in  acoustics.  A  device 
developed  by  American  physicists  gave  our 
men  nineteen  seconds  in  which  to  take  cover 
from  cannon  fired  four  miles  away.  The  most 
brilliant  work  in  this  field  was  that  of  a  former 
student  of  the  Columbia  School  of  Mines. 

If  I  were  to  pick  out  one  field  in  which  the 
scholarly  attitude  has  been  most  brilliantly 
rewarded,  it  is  that  of  medicine.  If  our  army 
surgeons  and  sanitarians  had  been  confined  to 
the  practical  family  doctors,  who  cannot  be 
bothered  with  all  this  new-fangled  stuff,  our 
men  would  have  died  like  flies  from  disease,  as 
they  did  in  the  Spanish-American  War.  It  was 
the  laboratory  man,  the  theorist,  the  high- 
brow if  you  like,  who  made  our  health  record 
a  matter  of  national  pride  and  congratulation. 
It  was  the  knowledge  of  a  scholar,  coupled  with 
his  instinctive  understanding  of  the  human  heart 
—  neither  could  have  accomplished  the  purpose 
alone  —  which  sent  hundreds  of  shell-shocks, 
as  they  came  to  be  called  (people  used  to  call 
the  condition  by  an  uglier,  if  not  a  shorter, 

42 


A  PRACTICAL  TEST   OF  SCHOLARSHIP 

term)  back  into  the  lines  with  self-respect  and 
nerve  renewed. 

To  turn  to  another  field,  it  was  a  real  scholar, 
even  if  he  were  also  a  dean,  who,  in  spite  of 
the  best  efforts  of  his  practical  associates  to 
deter  him,  brought  order  out  of  chaos  in  the 
most  important  of  our  war  boards  through  the 
collection  and  skillful  presentation  of  statistical 
data. 

In  many  cases  it  was  the  scholar  whom  we 
must  thank  for  the  pointing  out  of  the  obvious. 
The  early  drafts  rejected  thousands  of  excellent 
potential  soldiers  because  our  existing  height 
regulations  were  drawn  for  men  of  the  northern 
European  races;  and  the  minimum  height  limit 
was  well  within  the  normal  variation  of  the 
men  of  southern  European  ancestry,  which  has 
been  so  large  an  element  in  our  recent  immi- 
gration. Similarly,  men  of  science  have  pointed 
out  that  the  length  of  the  marching  step  de- 
pends not  alone  on  the  length  of  the  legs,  but 
even  more  on  the  width  of  the  hips,  a  simple 
fact  which  is  of  real  military  significance.  The 
scholars  in  the  Forest  Products  laboratories 
knew  how  to  make  boxes  that  would  not  break 
and  spill  their  contents  on  the  wharves  at 
Hoboken  or  St.  Nazaire,  and,  equally  impor- 

43 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

tant,  they  knew  how  to  educate  the  quarter- 
masters to  use  them. 

The  fact  that  in  many  fields  we  reached  the 
limits  of  available  man-power  meant  a  wonder- 
ful stimulation  to  the  study  of  certain  problems 
affecting  human  welfare.  Take  for  example  the 
physiological  aspects  of  industrial  fatigue.  In 
this  field  an  excellent  theoretical  start  had  been 
made  before  the  war,  but  the  appeal  was  limited 
to  those  interested  in  the  individual  worker. 
With  the  war,  however,  and  the  shortage  of 
labor,  came  a  new  and,  I  fear,  a  more  potent 
appeal  —  the  interest  in  the  product  and  its 
prompt  production.  The  worker  who  collapsed 
could  not  be  replaced.  Long  hours  or  unsanitary 
surroundings  meant  spoiled  material  and  broken- 
down  machinery  and  resultant  delay.  And 
when  there  was  a  scholar  at  hand  to  show  why 
this  was  so,  you  may  be  sure  he  had  his  day 
in  court. 

The  work  of  the  scholar  has  not  wholly  been 
in  getting  things  done.  Perhaps  an  equally 
important  side  was  in  keeping  impossible  or 
unprofitable  things  from  being  attempted.  When 
time  was  of  the  very  essence  of  the  whole  pro- 
gram, the  man  who  could  say  "No"  and  prove 
the  validity  of  his  objection,  performed  a  posi- 

44 


A   PRACTICAL  TEST  OF  SCHOLARSHIP 

tive  work  of  great  value.  One  of  our  associates 
at  Columbia  had  a  leading  share  in  devising 
tests  for  candidates  for  the  flying  school,  which, 
by  rejecting  the  unfit  at  the  outset,  saved  many 
lives  from  the  time  of  their  adoption  and  many, 
many  thousands  of  dollars;  for  the  training  of 
a  flyer  who  cannot  be  used  when  the  time  comes 
is  a  very  costly  piece  of  national  extravagance 
in  both  money  and  men. 

Our  scholars  did  not  confine  their  activities 
to  the  battle  of  Washington.  Not  only  as 
engineers  and  doctors,  but  as  geologists  and 
geographers,  as  meteorologists  and  sanitarians, 
they  went  with  the  troops  to  the  front,  and 
their  counsel  as  to  actual  military  operations 
was  welcomed  and  followed.  One  of  them,  a 
bachelor  and  doctor  of  this  University,  died 
in  the  service  in  France.  The  scholar,  like 
the  soldier,  stood  ready  to  step  forward  to  fill 
the  gap  in  the  ranks  as  he  saw  it,  regardless  of 
whether  something  more  dignified  might  be 
found  for  him  to  do.  Our  own  Barnard,  Pro- 
fessor of  Education,  took  what  he  was  pleased 
to  call  his  vacation  in  applying  his  scholarship 
to  organizing  an  educational  program  for  the 
wounded  men  in  our  hospitals,  as  a  therapeutic 
measure.  Being  a  scholar  and  not  merely  an 

45 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

expert,  he  saw  the  broad  human  aspect  of  his 
specialty;  that  the  first  thing  to  do  with  the 
man  who  is  blinded,  or  otherwise  maimed,  is 
to  make  him  realize  that  it  is  worth  while  to 
get  well;  that  he  can  have  a  life  which  is  worth 
living;  that  if  his  old  job  is  no  longer  possible, 
there  are  others  for  which  he  can  be  trained. 
One  of  America's  most  distinguished  philosophical 
chemists  settled  down  to  the  humble  but  very 
essential  problem  of  making  mixed  flours  rise  and 
bake  with  a  crust  —  and  solved  it.  The  war 
services  of  a  past  President  of  this  Chapter,  now, 
alas,  no  longer  with  us,  and  those  of  our  present 
President  have  been  as  useful  as  they  have  been 
inconspicuous. 

The  need  for  the  scholar  was  not  only  quali- 
tative, but  quantitative.  But  for  the  general 
distribution  of  chemical  knowledge  in  France 
and  England,  and  the  presence  of  men  capable  of 
promptly  applying  that  knowledge  to  combat 
the  gas  attacks  launched  by  the  Germans,  the 
war  would  have  been  lost  before  we  could  pos- 
sibly have  rendered  the  slightest  assistance; 
and  on  our  side  of  the  Atlantic  when  the  armis- 
tice was  signed,  there  were  two  thousand  trained 
chemists'  engaged  in  the  problems  of  gas  war- 
fare alone.  Our  country,  in  a  word,  needed  not 

46 


A  PRACTICAL  TEST  OF  SCHOLARSHIP 

only  to  have  some  men  with  the  requisite 
training,  but  men  enough  to  meet  simultaneously 
many  needs  in  many  fields,  and  these  men  were 
drawn  in  large  measure  from  our  academic 
faculties.  While  one  must  not  press  the  identity 
between  the  scholar  and  the  professor  too  hard 
—  for  a  number  of  reasons  —  the  fact  remains 
that  the  teaching  profession  provided  the  main 
reservoir  from  which  the  country  drew.  One 
of  my  friends  in  the  Chemical  Warfare  Service 
has  summarized  the  relation  between  the  aca- 
demic scholar  and  that  branch  of  the  army 
activity.  Both  chiefs  of  the  Chemical  Service 
Station  were  college  professors,  one  of  them  a 
member  of  this  Chapter  of  Phi  Beta  Kappa.  Of 
the  fourteen  heads  of  the  Research  Division,  eight 
were  college  professors.  It  was  the  college  pro- 
fessors who  made  fundamental  improvements  in 
gas  masks  on  the  one  hand,  and  who  devised  new 
gases  to  test  the  German  masks  on  the  other. 

As  a  nation,  we  did  not  realize  at  the  outset, 
as  Germany  did,  the  importance  of  the  man 
who  knows,  and  of  knowing  who  he  is  and 
where  he  is;  and  here,  perhaps,  lay  our  most 
fundamental  un preparedness.  What  this  cost 
us  may  be  judged  from  a  single  instance.  A  code 

47 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

message  from  Germany  directing  the  dismantling 
of  the  German  ships  lying  in  our  ports  was 
intercepted.  If  we  had  known  that  there  was 
a  professor  of  English  in  the  University  of 
Chicago  who,  in  the  pursuit  of  his  medieval  re- 
searches, had  developed  the  power  of  reading 
ciphers  almost  at  sight,  that  cable  from  Germany 
could  have  been  promptly  deciphered,  we  could 
have  forestalled  the  sabotage,  and  something 
like  six  months  in  the  use  of  these  ships  for  the 
transport  of  our  troops  and  munitions  could 
have  been  gained. 

The  job  of  getting  the  man  who  knew  into 
the  right  niche  was  not  an  easy  one.  The 
scholars  could  not  all  be  spared;  for,  after  all, 
education  and  research  are  essential  industries, 
and,  fortunately  for  our  institutions  of  learning, 
for  our  reviews  and  scientific  agencies,  and 
fortunately  for  the  country  as  a  whole,  all  of 
our  scholars  did  not  rush  immediately  into 
government  work.  The  less  thrilling  task  of 
keeping  the  lamps  burning  in  our  lighthouses 
was  never  more  important  than  during  the 
stormy  days  which  we  have  just  gone  through. 
Furthermore,  the  scholar  is  a  modest  person, 
though  he  has  his  human  vanities,  as  we  all 
know  who  have  seen  our  colleagues  in  uniform; 

48 


A  PRACTICAL  TEST   OF   SCHOLARSHIP 

but  usually  some  one  had  to  know  about  him 
and  invite  him  to  his  place,  a  very  sharp  con- 
trast to  the  business  men  and  lawyers  who  came 
down  to  Washington  by  the  trainload  to  im- 
press us  with  their  capacity  to  do  any  job  which 
involved  a  commission  of  properly  high  degree. 

In  general,  I  should  say  that  the  individuals 
in  the  universities  met  the  test  better  than  the 
institutions  themselves.  The  latter  did  not,  it 
seems  to  me,  as  institutions,  grasp  the  situation. 
Very  few  studied  the  question  of  the  assignment 
of  their  specialists  as  a  problem  in  conservation 
as  well  as  in  publicity;  and  as  far  as  the  use 
of  their  facilities  in  the  training  of  soldiers  and 
sailors  is  concerned,  the  War  Department  and 
the  Navy  Department  had  literally  to  teach 
them  how  to  meet  the  war  conditions.  Such 
help  as  came  from  organized  bodies  of  scholars 
came  rather  from  the  learned  societies  than 
from  the  academic  groups. 

Then  there  was  a  further  difficulty,  partic- 
ularly among  the  younger  men,  though  not 
wholly  among  them.  The  expert's  job,  and 
hence  inclusively  the  scholar's  job,  is  relatively 
safe  so  far  as  the  immediate  risk  of  death  is 
concerned,  though  not  the  risk  of  shortening 
life  through  overwork.  One  Columbia  man, 

49 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

well  over  the  draft  age,  told  me  frankly  that 
he  would  gladly  give  up  an  important  public 
office  he  held  for  the  privilege  of  fighting  with 
his  hands,  but  he  could  not  be  tempted  by  an 
opportunity  to  fight  with  his  head.  Through 
this  same  impulse  many  and  many  a  man  at- 
tempted to  conceal  his  special  knowledge  in 
order  that  he  might  fight  in  the  line.  The 
Army  Committee  on  Classification  of  Personnel, 
which  was  in  itself  a  beautiful  example  of 
scholarship  in  practical  application,  was  able, 
however,  in  most  instances  to  pluck  out  the 
expert  from  the  line  and  set  him,  whether  he 
was  willing  or  not,  at  the  task  for  which  he 
was  particularly  adapted  and  particularly  needed. 

What,  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  non- 
scholar,  can  be  said  as  to  the  general  usefulness 
of  the  men  and  women  (for  the  women  did 
their  share)  who  came  forward  or  were  brought 
forward  to  take  this  trial  by  fire  on  behalf  of 
American  scholarship?  First  of  all,  the  scholar 
must  be  a  real  scholar;  he  must  have  the 
natural  ability  and  the  long  and  rigorous  train- 
ing necessary  for  accurate  observation,  and 
observation  of  the  kind  which,  if  I  may  be  for- 
given a  most  unscholarly  metaphor,  includes 

50 


A  PRACTICAL  TEST  OF  SCHOLARSHIP 

the  ability  to  distinguish  the  blue  chips  from 
the  white;  his  deductions  must  be  relentless, 
and  his  inductions  must  be  luminous.  That  is 
asking  a  good  deal,  and  it  would  be  enough 
if  his  dealings  were  to  be  with  other  scholars  or 
with  scholars  in  the  making.  The  papers  of 
a  leisurely  recluse  can  be  dug  out  by  others 
from  the  even  more  deliberately  published  pro- 
ceedings of  learned  societies,  even  as  the  author 
has  dug  out  those  of  his  predecessors,  and 
ultimately  the  practical  application  of  his  dis- 
coveries will  be  made.  In  national  emergency, 
however,  this  process  will  not  suffice.  The 
scholar  must  descend  from  his  tower;  he  must, 
if  he  is  to  serve  effectively,  learn  to  think  to 
order  and  to  do  it  rapidly,  to  deal  with  all 
sorts  and  conditions  of  men;  he  must  bear 
with  their  amazing  ignorances  and  profit  by 
their  equally  amazing  knowledge  of  things  of 
which  he  is  ignorant.  He  must  know  the  art 
of  team  play.  The  war  has  brought  out  a  new 
type  of  scholarship,  or  at  any  rate  has  developed 
it  to  such  an  extent  that  its  implications  are 
new,  and  that  is  the  unselfish  cooperation  of 
experts  to  meet  a  given  and  usually  an  imme- 
diately pressing  need.  The  development  of 
the  Liberty  motor  furnishes  a  good  example 

51 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

of  the  results  of  such  cooperative  effort.  It 
seems  to  me  that  the  most  important  single 
lesson  which  our  scholars  can  learn  from  the 
experience  of  the  two  past  years  is  the  impor- 
tance of  this  team  play  in  scholarship,  and  not 
only  team  play  with  other  scholars,  but  team 
play  with  those  who  have  the  equally  valuable 
and  perhaps  even  rarer  gift  of  getting  things 
done,  who  perhaps  deserve  the  title  of  scholars 
in  the  control  of  time  and  space.  The  scholars 
who  made  good  were  those  who  had  had  not 
only  the  training  and  temperament  for  research, 
but  the  training  and  temperament  for  working 
with  other  people.  The  scholarship  of  the  man 
who  from  self-centerdness  or  from  a  mistaken 
absorption  in  his  specialty  lacked  the  art  of 
dealing  with  his  fellow  men  was  likely  to  prove 
a  sterile  scholarship,  and  in  most  cases  a  useless 
scholarship  in  the  day  of  national  need. 

One  of  the  most  dramatic  things  about  the 
war  was  the  speeding  up  of  supply  and  trans- 
port under  the  strong  hand  of  the  man  who 
had  brought  the  Panama  Canal  to  completion. 
General  Goethals  was  no  administrative  theorist. 
He  was  willing  to  try  anything  and  anybody 
once,  but  he  was  prompt  in  rejecting  what  did 
not  promptly  accomplish  his  purpose.  An  en- 

52 


A    PRACTICAL  TEST  OF  SCHOLARSHIP 

gineer  of  General  Goethals'  distinction  can  be 
regarded  as  a  scholar  in  his  particular  field; 
but  the  point  I  want  to  make  is  that  during 
his  service  as  Quartermaster-General,  when  of- 
ficers of  the  regular  army  and  over-night 
majors,  as  they  were  called,  presidents  of  manu- 
facturing plants,  bankers  and  lawyers,  were 
passing  in  what  seemed  to  be  an  almost  un- 
broken procession  through  his  office,  he  retained 
just  two  men  in  his  inner  circle  from  first  to 
last,  and  both  were  academic  persons.  Herbert 
Hoover  surrounded  himself  with  scholars,  ento- 
mologists, statisticians  and  public  health  men. 
He  did  not  always  use  them  for  their  specialties, 
but  he  evidently  liked  the  type.  The  great 
welfare  societies  did  the  same,  and  the  list  of 
academic  men  whom  they  used  makes  an  im- 
pressive total. 

These  instances  are  typical  of  a  very  general 
success  among  scholars  in  cooperating  effectively 
and  helpfully  with  eminently  practical  men. 
This  may  be  because  the  scholar  has  been 
trained  in  a  form  of  competition  which  the 
so-called  practical  man  lacked.  He  is  used  to 
having  his  work  wiped  out  by  some  discovery 
of  a  rival,  and  having  to  begin  afresh.  He  is 
used  to  a  checking  of  his  work  by  his  fellows 

53 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

which,  if  of  a  different  nature,  is  no  less  relent- 
less than  the  war-time  check  in  the  toll  of 
human  lives.  The  man  of  high  reputation  in 
business  often  failed  because  he  had  learned  to 
measure  success  and  his  own  competence  only 
in  terms  of  dividends,  and  in  the  new  test  he 
found  his  measuring-rod  worse  than  useless. 

Our  scholars  of  the  cooperative  type  not  only 
pursued  their  researches,  but  they  got  their 
military  associates  into  the  habit  of  thinking 
in  terms  of  scholarship.  One  of  their  most 
useful  accomplishments,  initiated  by  a  Doctor 
of  Philosophy  of  this  University,  was  the  or- 
ganization of  Thursday  evening  conferences  for 
the  discussion  of  the  new  scientific  and  technical 
problems  facing  the  Army  and  Navy.  This 
furnished  a  nucleus  for  the  exchange  of  ideas 
between  the  different  research  groups,  both  here 
and  abroad;  for  scholarship  was  mobilized 
and  utilized  in  France,  England,  and  Italy,  as 
well  as  here,  and  our  Allies  laid  their  scientific 
discoveries  before  us  with  the  greatest  loyalty. 
At  these  conferences  their  reports  were  dis- 
cussed and  digested  and  applied,  instead  of  being 
pigeon-holed  at  the  War  College,  as  I  fear 
might  have  been  otherwise  the  case.  It  was  as 
a  result  of  one  of  these  conferences  that  a 

54 


A  PRACTICAL  TEST  OF  SCHOLARSHIP 

member  of  this  Chapter,  acting  on  a  hint  which 
came  from  a  French  report,  was  largely  instru- 
mental in  developing  a  method  of  submarine 
detection  through  sound-waves  of  a  particular 
type,  which,  though  it  came  too  late  to  be  of 
service  in  the  war,  may  serve  in  peace  to  relieve 
the  greatest  terror  of  the  mariner,  the  danger 
of  collision  in  darkness  or  fog  with  sister  vessel 
or  iceberg  or  derelict.  A  potent  factor  in 
breaking  down  the  barriers  and  delays  of  de- 
partmental jealousies  and  bureaucratic  tradition 
all  along  the  line  was  the  free-masonry  of  the 
company  of  scholars  in  Washington. 

It  must  not  be  forgotten  that  our  scholar  in 
war  worked  under  two  powerful  stimuli,  neither 
of  them  operative  under  ordinary  conditions. 
Although  he  was  out  of  his  accustomed  setting, 
working  with  strange  people  and  at  strange 
tasks,  nevertheless  the  realization  of  the  na- 
tional need  and  the  joy  of  feeling  an  identifica- 
tion with  the  forces  facing  the  adversary  tended 
to  produce  that  fine  frenzy  which  enables  a 
man  to  do  better  than  he  knows  how.  Then, 
for  the  first  time  in  history,  the  scholar  had 
unlimited  funds.  It  is  an  interesting  subject  for 
speculation  as  to  how  he  can  ever  go  back  to 
the  limits  of  academic  appropriations.  It  is  ta 

55 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

be  feared  that  in  many  cases  he  will  not,  but 
will  turn  to  industrial  enterprises  instead.  If, 
however,  there  was  an  unlimited  supply  of 
funds,  there  was  a  corresponding  deficiency  in 
time,  and  the  scholar  who  could  not  speed  up 
to  meet  the  new  conditions  had  little  chance 
to  make  his  mark.  The  men  who  failed  in  war 
because  they  could  not  grasp  the  significance 
of  the  time  factor  may,  however,  still  be  emi- 
nently useful  in  peace.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  training  which  some  of  our  scholars  received 
in  meeting  another  war-tune  condition  is  likely 
to  have  an  important  influence  upon  the  relation 
of  scholarship  to  industry.  Many  a  scholar 
found  for  the  first  time  that  to  meet  a  given 
condition  a  beautiful  laboratory  solution  may 
be  no  solution  at  all,  that  the  answer,  to  be 
effective,  must  meet  the  peculiar  condition  of 
quantity  production. 

The  merit  of  the  Liberty  engine,  of  which  I 
have  already  spoken,  lies  not  alone  in  the  ex- 
cellence of  its  design,  admirable  as  that  is,  but 
in  the  fact  that  it  is  so  constructed  that  we 
could  produce  fifteen  hundred  of  them  in  a 
single  week.  Or,  to  take  another  example,  in 
1914  we  made  all  together  eighteen  hundred  field 
glasses  in  this  country.  Last  winter,  thanks  to 

56 


A  PRACTICAL  TEST  OF   SCHOLARSHIP 

the  cooperation  of  the  scholars  in  the  chemistry 
of  glass  and  in  the  field  of  optics  on  the  one 
hand,  and  of  the  experts  in  quantity  pro- 
duction on  the  other,  we  were  making  thirty- 
five  hundred  pairs  of  field  glasses  each  week. 
There  are  many  other  adaptations  of  scholar- 
ship to  industry  that  are  awaiting  similar 
practical  solutions.  One  of  our  most  dis- 
tinguished scholars  in  physics  has  said  publicly 
that  the  day  is  past  when  one  can  defend  any 
distinction  between  pure  and  applied  science. 
One  might  as  well  try  to  distinguish  between 
pure  and  applied  virtue. 

I  said  at  the  outset  that  I  would  venture  later 
on  an  enlargement  of  the  conception  of  the  Amer- 
ican scholar,  in  the  light  of  what  the  past  two 
years  have  made  so  clear.  The  scholar  himself 
as  well  as  those  of  us  who  are  not  scholars, 
needs,  I  think,  to  get  a  somewhat  broader  con- 
ception of  the  term;  to  develop  it  from  its 
present  popular  connotation  so  that  the  at- 
tributes which  come  to  one's  mind  will  no 
longer  be  the  static  and  selfish,  but  rather  the 
dynamic  and  social.  Emerson,  in  his  essay  on 
the  American  Scholar,  seems  to  have  some 
prophetic  glimpse  of  this  broader  conception. 
He  says,  for  example,  that  "  action  is  with  the 

57 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

scholar  subordinate,  but  it  is  essential;  that 
without  it,  he  is  not  yet  man;  that  the  true 
scholar  grudges  every  opportunity  of  action 
passed  by,  as  a  loss  of  power ";  and  elsewhere, 
"that  a  great  soul  will  be  strong  to  live,  as 
well  as  strong  to  think. "  The  old  idea  of  the 
scholar  was  the  recluse,  the  individual;  the 
new,  it  seems  to  me,  should  be  one  of  a 
company  of  builders,  each  bringing  to  the 
common  task,  for  the  general  welfare,  his  train- 
ing and  craft,  his  knowledge  and  ideas,  to 
combine  them  with  the  gifts  which  his  fellows 
are  bringing. 

Thus  far  almost  all  my  modern  instances 
have  been  taken  from  the  realms  of  natural 
science.  I  need  not  remind  you,  however,  that 
although  science  has  tremendously  broadened 
the  range  of  scholarship,  nevertheless  the  schol- 
arship which  is  a  practical  asset  is  not  and 
never  will  be  limited  to  natural  science.  The 
record  of  the  past  two  years  has  many  an  ex- 
ample of  the  essentially  important  work  of 
scholars  in  other  fields.  The  records  are  not  so 
clear-cut,  the  results  are  perhaps  more  often 
negative;  but  the  work  was  done  and  it  counted. 
In  the  field  of  public  information  our  American 

58 


A  PRACTICAL  TEST  OF  SCHOLARSHIP 

scholars  in  the  political  sciences  did  excellent 
work  under  the  direction  of  a  Doctor  of  Phi- 
losophy of  this  University,  and  their  record  for 
fairness  and  sanity  makes  an  enviable  contrast 
with  the  pathetic  propaganda  of  the  German 
intellectuals.  Similarly,  the  work  of  our  Co- 
lumbia scholars  of  the  Legislative  Drafting 
Bureau  proved  of  great  value  in  formulating 
and,  perhaps  more  important,  in  discouraging 
legislation. 

In  general,  however,  I  think  we  ought  to  face 
the  fact  squarely  that  our  scholarship  in  man's 
relations  with  his  fellow  men,  in  his  understand- 
ing of  himself  and  his  fellows  as  contrasted 
with  his  mastery  of  physical  things,  cannot 
claim  so  clear-cut  a  decision.  Even  in  science 
we  should  not  set  too  great  store  by  ourselves. 
Professor,  late  Colonel,  Millikan  writes:  "The 
contribution  of  the  United  States  in  research 
and  development  lines  was  less,  far  less  in  pro- 
portion to  our  resources  and  population,  than 
that  of  England  or  France,  and  this  in  spite 
of  the  far  heavier  strain  under  which  they  were 
laboring."  And  yet,  with  us,  science  was  better 
mobilized,  better  equipped,  and  can  make  a 
better  showing  than  the  humanities.  Part  of 
this  can  be  readily  explained  by  the  statement 

59 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

that  preparation  for  war  is  after  all  engineering 
on  a  huge  scale.  But  we  must  not  prove  too 
much  if  we  are  to  profit  by  the  lesson.  For 
example,  the  war  found  us  utterly  unprepared 
in  foreign-language  knowledge;  and  we  are  still 
unprepared.  How  many  real  Americans,  I  don't 
mean  recent  immigrants,  but  men  and  women 
with  our  traditions  and  our  point  of  view,  can 
speak  Russian?  How  many  can  speak  the 
languages  of  the  Near  East  or  Far  East? 

Excellent  work  has  been  done  by  individual 
philosophers,  economists,  and  sociologists  in 
labor  questions,  in  welfare  work,  on  the  war- 
time trade  and  industrial  boards;  but  as  a 
whole  our  scholars  in  these  fields  did  not  dom- 
inate the  situation  as  did  the  men  of  science 
in  theirs.  Of  course,  their  task  was  infinitely 
harder.  For  one  thing,  though  we  may  be  ready 
to  confess  our  ignorance  of  calculus  or  colloidal 
chemistry  or  thermo-dynamics,  we  all  believe 
in  the  validity  of  our  off-hand  judgments  in 
politics  and  morals,  and  indeed  in  all  the  springs 
of  human  conduct.  Yet  when  all  allowances 
are  made,  the  fact  remains  that  there  is  a 
scholarship  in  these  matters  and  we  have  Amer- 
ican scholars  in  them,  but  that  with  distinguished 
exceptions  these  professionals  permitted  the 

60 


A  PRACTICAL  TEST   OF   SCHOLARSHIP 

man  in  the  street  or  the  man  in  the  editor's 
chair,  or  in  Congress,  or  in  the  Cabinet,  to 
proclaim  his  amateur  pronouncement  and  to  get 
away  with  it.  Indeed,  I  will  go  further  and 
say  that  not  a  few  who  know  or  ought  to  know 
that  it  is  not  necessary  to  be  intolerant  in  order 
to  be  patriotic  seemed  to  set  their  knowledge 
upon  this  point  at  one  side.  In  war  time  it  is 
a  matter  for  the  scholar's  judgment  and  con- 
science to  decide  whether  it  is  wise  to  attempt  a 
leadership  which  at  the  moment  will  be  misun- 
derstood and  probably  ineffective,  possibly  even 
dangerous,  because  of  the  reaction,  to  the  cause 
he  has  at  heart;  or  to  bide  his  time  in  silence, 
awaiting  a  more  suitable  time  to  be  heard. 
But  I  submit  that  he  is  sinning  against  the 
light  when  he  joins  in  the  hue  and  cry  of  the 
untrained  and  the  half-trained.  The  war  has 
given  the  natural  scientist  his  chance,  and  he 
has  profited  thereby.  In  the  years  to  come 
the  test  will,  I  think,  shift  to  the  scholars  in 
the  human  sciences.  The  crises  of  the  future 
will  have  to  do  with  problems  of  human  con- 
duct rather  than  of  the  control  of  physical 
things;  and,  as  these  crises  come,  our  scholars 
in  human  relations  should  be  more  ready  for 
the  call  to  mobilize. 

61 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

In  practically  every  case  the  instances  that 
I  have  given  of  the  successful  tests  of  our 
scholarship  involve  the  work  of  a  member,  of 
Phi  Beta  Kappa  or  of  the  sister  society,  Sigma 
Xi;  and  I  therefore  may  be  permitted  to  say  a 
word  more  directly  to  our  younger  members 
of  the  society  of  those  seeking  the  philosophy 
of  life,  to  our  Columbia  scholars  in  the  making. 
In  my  time,  which,  by  the  way,  was  just  twenty- 
one  years  ago,  a  man  who  wanted  to  live  the 
life  of  a  scholar  was  practically  limited  to  teach- 
ing as  the  means  of  making  his  living.  The 
result  in  the  way  of  incompetent  and  half- 
hearted teaching  we  all  know.  Let  me  say 
to  you  of  to-day  that  unless  you  want  to  teach, 
there  is  no  reason  under  heaven  why  you  should 
do  so.  There  are  plenty  of  other  means  of 
earning  an  honest  living.  The  scholar  is  not 
nowadays  limited  to  the  academic  halls.  We 
have  scholars  of  the  first  quality  not  only  in 
special  research  institutions,  but  in  government 
bureaus  and  in  industrial  organizations.  The 
men  in  government  service  who  could  be  spared 
from  their  other  responsibilities  for  war  work 
made  an  excellent  war  record.  On  the  other 
hand,  we  want  to  remember  that  the  real 
teacher,  whether  in  the  faculty  or  out  of  it, 

62 


A  PRACTICAL  TEST  OF  SCHOLARSHIP 

has  a  tremendous  advantage  in  the  art  of  pres- 
entation. During  the  war  the  effectiveness  of 
our  scholar  teachers  was  well  tested  by  an 
entirely  new  set  of  pupils,  pupils  sometimes 
with  eagles  or  stars  on  their  shoulders,  or  in 
the  civil  field,  captains  of  industry,  clad  in  the 
glittering  armor  of  a  big  business  reputation. 

Nowadays  one  cannot  be  a  scholar  in  general. 
One  has  to  have  some  specialty.  As  to  what 
that  specialty  shall  be  in  terms  of  usefulness  to 
the  community,  I  think  I  have  given  you  ex- 
amples enough  to  show  that  the  range  is  almost 
unlimited.  I  had  planned  to  sum  up  this  by 
a  brief  record  of  the  discovery  and  application 
to  war  purposes  of  helium;  but  I  find  that  one 
of  my  own  students  in  Columbia  College,  now 
a  member  of  the  Geological  Survey,  has  beaten 
me  out;  and  you  can  find  the  whole  story  in 
the  May  issue  of  the  National  Geographic  Maga- 
zine. I  cannot  resist,  however,  a  summary  of 
the  steps.  First,  the  astronomer,  just  about 
the  time  this  chapter  was  established,  finds  a 
new  line  in  the  solar  spectrum.  Thirty  years 
later,  the  geologist  comes  upon  an  unusual 
stone  and  turns  to  a  great  chemist  for  its  anal- 
ysis, with  the  consequent  recognition  of  helium 
as  a  mundane  element.  About  the  same  tune 

63 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

comes  its  identification  as  one  of  the  newly 
recognized  ingredients  of  the  ah1,  and  the  study 
of  its  properties.  Then  a  Kansas  chemist  dis- 
covers its  presence  in  some  natural  gas  about 
which  he  was  consulted  because  it  would  not 
burn  properly.  Then  comes  the  war  with  its 
incendiary  bullet  and  the  need  of  a  non-in- 
flammable content  for  balloons  and  dirigibles. 
Then  the  cooperation  of  physicist,  engineer,  and 
geologist  —  Canadian  and  American  —  makes 
helium  available  for  this  purpose.  Before  these 
researches  helium  cost  $1700  a  cubic  foot  and 
was  obtainable  only  in  Germany.  The  present 
price  is  10  cents  a  cubic  foot,  and  it  is  falling. 
The  importance  of  all  this  for  peace  is  very 
great.  In  these  days  of  airplane  hops  we  are 
forgetting  that  a  Zeppelin  made  the  trip  from 
Bulgaria  to  what  should  have  been  German 
East  Africa  with  medicines  and  ammunition. 
The  Germans  having  disappeared  in  the  mean- 
tune,  the  Zeppelin  turned  around  and  came 
back,  making  a  continuous  voyage  of  several 
thousand  miles. 

But  do  not  forget  that  not  all  scholars  made 
good  in  the  great  test.  Let  me  sum  up  what  I 
have  already  said.  In  the  first  place,  to  be 
useful  the  scholarship  must  be  sound.  The 

64 


A  PRACTICAL  TEST  OF  SCHOLARSHIP 

near-scholar,  the  man  who  took  the  short-cut 
in  preparation,  proved  to  be  a  positive  danger. 
The  mere  expert  in  some  narrow  field,  the  man 
who  did  not  realize  the  implications  of  what 
he  knew,  was  relatively  useless.  A  man  to 
succeed  had  to  be  intense  without  being  narrow. 
Even  among  the  sound  scholars,  the  men  who 
really  knew,  the  isolated  and  insulated  individual 
could  very  rarely  make  much  headway.  It 
was  the  open-minded  scholar,  the  maker  and 
keeper  of  friends,  who  got  his  chance,  the 
scholar  whose  learning  was  to  him  a  living  thing, 
not  necessarily  to  be  displayed  in  the  market 
place,  and  never  for  the  sake  of  the  display, 
but  on  the  other  hand  never  wrapped  in  a 
napkin  and  buried  in  the  earth. 

Will  the  scholar,  now  that  his  practical  worth 
has  been  tested  and  proved,  be  content  to  slip 
back  into  relative  obscurity;  or  will  he,  on  the 
other  hand,  be  tempted  too  far  into  the  lime- 
light and  thereby  lose  those  very  qualities 
which  gave  him  his  value?  Will  he  be  satisfied 
with  positions  of  leadership  rather  than  leadership 
itself,  which  may  be  a  very  different  thing?  It  is 
largely  for  you  young  men  and  young  women  of 
the  rising  generation  of  scholars  to  say. 


65 


WHAT   HAVE  WE  LEARNED?1 

I  AM  going  to  try  to  select  three  or  four 
general  fields  in  which  we  Americans  have  had 
a  chance  to  learn  lessons  of  permanent  value 
as  the  result  of  our  war  experience.  Then  I 
shall  try  to  apply  these  to  what  seems  to  me 
the  most  typical  specimen  of  the  best  in  Ameri- 
can life,  a  great  American  University;  and 
finally,  I  shall  try  to  apply  them  to  the  situa- 
tion which  faces  you  young  men  and  women 
of  the  graduating  class  as  you  step  out  to  take 
your  places  in  the  world.  And  hi  so  doing 
I'm  going  to  look  deliberately  on  the  bright 
side.  There  are  troubles  enough  in  the  world 
to  worry  and  depress  us,  and  we  have  to  face 
them,  but  let  us  face  them  with  a  confidence 
that  is  justified  in  the  light  of  the  examples 
of  man's  endurance,  of  his  courage,  of  his  pos- 
sibilities of  accomplishment,  which  it  has  been 
our  privilege  to  witness  within  the  lifetime  of 
this  academic  generation. 

1  Commencement  address  delivered  at  the  University  of  Mich- 
igan, June  26,  1919. 

66 


WHAT   HAVE  WE   LEARNED? 

What  have  we  learned?  In  the  first  place, 
we  have  learned  that  as  a  nation  we  possess 
the  power  to  see  a  big  job  through,  and  we 
possess  it  because  we  have  the  qualities  of 
youth  —  enthusiasm,  learning  capacity,  energy, 
elasticity,  initiative  —  the  pioneering  spirit.  We 
have  the  shortcomings  of  youth  also  —  im- 
patience, superficiality,  improvidence,  cock-sure- 
ness —  but  when  the  test  came  we  managed  to 
strengthen  our  virtues  and  to  a  large  extent  to 
overcome  our  failings. 

The  various  stocks  that  have  emigrated  to  our 
shores  have  come  as  successive  waves  of  pioneers, 
of  men  to  whom  new  and.  unfamiliar  conditions 
serve  as  an  incentive  rather  than  a  discourage- 
ment, and  it  is  the  persistence  of  this  pioneer- 
ing spirit,  essentially  a  youthful  spirit,  which 
has  had  much  to  do  with  our  success. 

What  single  group  made  the  finest  impression 
in  the  great  war?  I  think  we  will  agree  that 
it  was  the  American  doughboy.  As  one  saw 
him  in  France  he  was  absolutely  youth  incar- 
nate, and  he  is  a  cross  section  of  our  complex 
population.  If  anyone  still  doubts  that  all  of 
these  stocks,  the  Teutonic  included,  have  been 
willing  to  do  their  share  even  at  the  risk  or 
cost  of  life,  let  him  read  any  of  the  lists  of 

67 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

battle  casualties  or  the  list  of  honors  for  heroic 
conduct  and  he  will  have  the  best  kind  of 
proof.  Let  us  remember  in  this  connection 
that  nearly  one-fourth  of  our  drafted  men 
couldn't  speak  and  write  English  adequately 
when  they  entered  the  Army.  In  spite  of  a 
number  of  unsightly  pieces  of  slag,  which  are 
either  floating  on  the  surface  or  have  sunk  to 
the  bottom,  the  great  national  melting  pot  has 
evidently  done  its  work  well. 

Our  heterogeneous  immigration,  our  enormous 
national  resources,  which  have  tempted  us  to 
live  on  capital  rather  than  on  interest,  our 
prosperity,  have  made  us  neither  fat  nor  flabby. 
We  now  know  that  as  a  people  we  don't  really 
care  about  money  or  the  money  game  if  we 
are  shown  some  other  game  better  worth  play- 
ing; that  selfishness  and  luxury  drop  away  as  if 
by  magic  when  they  interfere  with  the  keener 
satisfactions  of  giving  one's  self.  Even  for  us 
stay-at-homes,  the  Liberty  Loan  people,  Mr. 
Hoover,  the  Red  Cross  and  other  welfare  work- 
ers were  on  hand  to  show  us  how  to  play  the 
better  game.  I  don't  need  to  remind  you  of 
the  details,  nor  that  in  spite  of  human  grumbling 
and  talk  of  sacrifice,  in  the  bottom  of  our  hearts 
we  all  enjoyed  the  process. 

68 


WHAT  HAVE  WE  LEARNED? 

In  the  second  place,  we  have  learned  that  to 
see  the  job  through  we  need  all  of  the  nation, 
men  and  women,  not  merely  the  profession  of 
arms  and  the  mysterious  powers  of  finance  — 
we  need  all  of  everyone.  We  need  them  not 
as  individuals  but  as  a  team,  and  we  have 
learned  that  we  can  develop  team  play. 

Our  easiest  jobs  were  the  raising  of  our  men 
and  our  money;  our  hardest,  the  moulding  of 
the  whole  into  an  organic  unity.  Just  as  our 
young  men  by  the  millions  took  their  place  in 
the  line  when  the  bugle  blew,  older  men  by  the 
tens  of  thousands  left  their  private  affairs  to 
get  along  as  best  they  might,  and  regardless  of 
political  affiliations  or  personal  convenience, 
found  pla'ce  for  themselves  in  the  administrative 
army.  And  they  were  ably  seconded  by  the 
women.  Hundreds  of  men  in  key  positions 
have  gladly  borne  witness  to  the  share  which 
their  secretaries  and  their  other  women  asso- 
ciates played  in  bringing  about  the  needed 
results. 

The  first  days  of  the  war  were  days  of  whirl- 
ing confusion,  colored  by  glowing  forecasts. 
Then  followed  months  of  experimentation,  by 
trial  and  error,  of  hope  deferred  by  long  delays, 
of  well  meant  but  none  the  less  embarrassing 

69 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

internal  rivalries,  of  sudden  spurts.  Later  came 
the  days  of  last  autumn,  when  the  whole  great 
machine  was  throbbing  rhythmically  and  stead- 
ily, with  only  a  minor  " knock"  here  and  there  — 
a  sure  indication  to  the  watchful  enemy,  who 
had  had  more  than  a  taste  of  what  the  machine 
could  produce,  that  the  game  was  up;  and 
finally  the  eleventh  of  November  and  the  order 
to  reverse  the  engines. 

It  ought  to  be  evident  from  our  experience 
that  for  any  great  enterprise  we  need  all  the 
young  men  and  the  young  women,  and  all  the 
older  ones  who  are  still  young  in  heart.  We 
need  to  know  who  they  are,  where  they  are, 
what  they  can  do,  and  we  need  to  touch  them 
at  every  point;  for  not  only  do  we  need  them 
all,  but  we  need  all  of  each  one  of  them.  We 
should  never  again  face  a  great  national  crisis 
with  nearly  one-third  of  our  men  of  military 
age  unfit  for  hard  physical  work.  We  need 
campaigns  of  physical  education  and  social 
hygiene,  and  we  need  to  apply  the  lessons  in 
human  salvage  which  the  army  has  learned 
during  the  war.  But  we  need  more  than  each 
individual  and  all  of  him.  We  must  see  to  it 
that  the  individual  star,  of  whatever  magnitude, 
is  subordinated  to  the  team  play  of  the  group. 

70 


WHAT   HAVE  WE  LEARNED? 

And  team  play  means  more  than  energy  and 
"pep."  It  means  a  marshalling  of  the  old 
fashioned  and  homely  virtues  of  courtesy,  defer- 
ence and  consideration. 

In  the  third  place,  we  have  learned  that  to 
accomplish  a  great  result  we  need  the  leader- 
ship of  those  who  know  and  who  know  vividly 
and  constructively.  Our  experience  has  .  been 
that  in  certain  fields,  finance,  science,  manu- 
facturing in  quantity  production,  medicine,  we 
had  a  supply  of  those  who  knew.  In  other 
fields,  in  intimate  knowledge  of  foreign  condi- 
tions and  foreign  languages  for  example,  we 
had  not. 

At  first  we  didn't  know  where  our  leaders 
were,  and  in  many  cases  we  began  by  following 
false  prophets.  The  value  of  one  man  with 
training,  brains  and  persistence  can  be  shown 
by  a  single  example:  There  was  a  man  who 
answered  these  qualifications  connected  with  the 
Council  of  National  Defence,  not  in  a  very 
exalted  position.  He  was  the  first  in  all  this 
country  to  see  that  the  army  program  and  the 
shipping  program  did  not  fit.  It  took  him  a 
long  time  to  convince  the  two  groups  of  over- 
worked, harried  officials  that  neither  could  play 

71 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

the  game  alone;  that  the  closest  cooperation 
was  necessary.  He  had  no  access  to  the  records, 
but  he  finally  managed  to  build  up  a  convincing 
statement  out  of  the  shreds  of  information 
which  he  gathered  here  and  there,  and  at  last 
he  succeeded  in  getting  everyone  concerned 
into  the  attitude  of  wanting  to  face  the  facts. 
Everyone  would  have  had  to  face  them  sooner  or 
later,  but  without  the  devotion  and  leadership  of 
this  one  man,  it  would  have  been  only  as  the 
result  of  a  very  serious  dislocation  of  function. 

One  field  in  which  the  right  leadership  has 
been  most  brilliantly  rewarded  is  that  of  medi- 
cine. Just  consider  what  we  have  done  in  this 
field:  The  success  of  the  anti-typhoid  injections; 
the  reduction  in  dysenteric  diseases  due  to 
chlorination  of  drinking  water;  the  encouraging 
fight  against  cerebro-spinal  meningitis  and  pneu- 
monia; the  identification  of  trench  fever,  and 
the  practical  freedom  from  typhus.  As  to 
wounds,  a  tetanus  antitoxin  which  has  made 
lock-jaw  almost  a  negligible  disease;  a  serum 
against  gas  gangrene;  the  Carrel-Dakin  method 
of  chemical  sterilization  of  wounds;  the  splint- 
ing of  fractures  on  the  battle  field  and  over- 
head extension  apparatus  in  the  hospital.  To 
quote  Simon  Flexner,  "The  entire  psychology 

72 


WHAT   HAVE  WE   LEARNED? 

of  the  wounded  men  was  altered,  the  wards 
made  cheerful  and  happy,  pain  abolished,  in- 
fection controlled,  and  recovery  hastened  by 
means  of  the  new  or  improved  surgical  and 
mechanical  measures  put  into  common  use." 

The  fourth  lesson  of  which  I  wish  to  speak  is 
that  a  high  aim  and  ideal  is  what  counts  most 
of  all,  what  lifts  the  individual  up  from  selfish- 
ness and  sloth.  To  bind  the  country  together 
and  to  make  the  transformation  which  still 
seems  miraculous,  we  had  a  noble  national  aim, 
a  complete  dedication  to  the  task  before  us,  an 
utter  absence  of  any  selfish  or  self-seeking  factor 
in  the  whole  enterprise.  The  conduct  of  our 
soldiers,  their  submission  to  a  discipline  to  which 
most  of  them  were  completely  unused  was,  I 
think,  in  a  very  large  measure  due  to  the  recog- 
nition of  this  aim.  We  recognized  it  as  a  nation 
and  we  recognized  it  in  one  another.  The 
standard  of  contact  set  by  our  soldiers  during 
the  days  of  conflict  is  unique  in  military  history. 
Whole  divisions  went  for  months  without  a 
single  court-martial.  The  reason  was,  more 
than  anything  else,  the  national  assumption  that 
they  would  give  a  good  account  of  themselves 
and  the  fact  that  they  felt  themselves  in  train- 

73 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

ing  for  the  championship,  and  no  man  wanted 
to  miss  his  chance  on  the  battlefield  for  the  sake 
of  a  selfish  indulgence. 

Some  of  the  experiments  in  conduct  tried  in 
the  American  Expeditionary  Forces  were  ex- 
traordinary in  their  success.  The  leave  areas,  an 
immense  enterprise,  were  run  on  the  basis  of 
absolute  freedom  to  the  enlisted  man.  He  lived 
in  the  best  hotels  in  Europe  and  amused  him- 
self in  casinos  where  crowned  heads  had  been 
in  the  habit  of  gambling  away  the  money  of 
their  subjects.  He  had  no  roll  calls,  no  taps, 
no  officers  in  sight,  no  military  machinery  what- 
ever. He  arose  when  he  pleased,  either  before 
or  after  his  breakfast;  he  ate  and  drank  when 
he  pleased,  and  he  stayed  out  as  late  as  he 
pleased.  The  physical  and  moral  effect  of  this 
absolute  change  from  the  military  regime  was 
a  very  interesting  and  instructive  phenomenon, 
but  that  is  not  the  point  I  wish  to  make.  Out 
of  the  thousands  and  thousands  of  men  who 
were  sent  to  these  leave  areas,  there  was  hardly 
a  single  case  in  which  a  man  abused  the  trust 
which  was  put  upon  him  or  failed  to  turn  up 
on  time  to  go  back  to  the  grind  of  military  duty. 
This  could  never  have  been  done  with  soldiers 
of  another  type,  with  soldiers  lacking  an  ideal. 

74 


WHAT   HAVE  WE   LEARNED? 

Someone  has  recently  written  that  fine  minds 
have  been  finely  touched  by  the  war,  and  base 
minds  basely.  He  might  have  added  that  wise 
minds  have  been  wisely  touched,  and  foolish 
minds  foolishly.  In  general,  I  think  it  may 
fairly  be  said  that  when  the  appeal  was  to  the 
finest  in  a  man's  character,  the  result  was  cor- 
respondingly fine. 

These,  it  seems  to  me,  are  the  four  main 
things  we  have  learned,  or  at  any  rate  we  have 
had  a  chance  to  learn.  First,  that  we  are  a 
real  nation,  potentially  strong  with  the  strength 
of  youth.  Second,  that  to  fulfill  our  mission, 
every  man  and  woman  and  all  of  every  such 
individual  is  an  object  of  national  concern; 
that  we  must  be  mobilized  and  we  must  con- 
tinue our  lessons  in  team  play.  We  have  still 
plenty  to  learn  in  this  field.  Third,  that  we 
must  have  and  must  recognize  the  leadership 
of  those  who  know,  which,  after  all,  is  the 
great  test  of  a  democracy.  Fourth,  that  to 
bring  out  the  best  that  is  in  us,  as  individuals 
and  as  a  nation,  we  must  have  an  aim,  high, 
clear-cut  and  clearly  understood.  If,  now,  I 
attempt  to  apply  these  four  lessons  which  we 
have  had  a  chance  to  learn,  to  educational  con- 

75 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

ditions,  and  particularly  to  university  condi- 
tions, it  will  be  for  three  reasons:  The  first  is 
the  general  wisdom  of  confining  one's  remarks 
to  things  he  knows  something  about.  The 
second,  that  there  is  no  single  institution  more 
characteristic  of  the  best  in  our  American  life 
than  a  great  American  University.  And  there  is 
this  third  reason,  that  if  we  had  not  had  a  supply 
of  young  men  with  the  stamp  of  the  American 
college  upon  them,  we  could  never  have  met  the 
call  for  officers,  for  nearly  a  quarter  of  a  million 
of  them.  I  am  told  that  the  Germans  were 
prepared  to  admit  and  to  discount  our  wealth  in 
money,  in  materials  and  in  man  power,  but  they 
looked  forward  confidently  to  a  complete  failure 
on  our  part  in  training  officers  to  lead  our  men 
in  battle.  Of  course,  all  the  citizen  officers 
who  made  good  records  were  not  college  men, 
but  the  college  trained  citizens  were  the  men 
who  set  the  pace  and  made  the  standard. 

It  was  Pitt  who  said,  "The  atrocious  crime 
of  being  a  young  man  I  shall  attempt  neither 
to  palliate  nor  to  deny."  Nor  should  a  uni- 
versity seek  to  palliate  or  to  deny  the  charge 
of  being  a  place  of  resort  for  youth.  A  uni- 
versity, it  seems  to  me,  should  be  a  place  where 
the  primary  object  is  not  the  repression  of 

76 


WHAT  HAVE  WE  LEARNED? 

youthful  exuberance  nor  the  correction  of  youth- 
ful failings  (though  both  may  be  necessary  on 
occasion),  but  rather,  a  place  for  the  encourage- 
ment of  the  great  and  vital  qualities  of  youth  — 
enthusiasm,  energy,  power  of  acquisition,  sen- 
sitiveness of  impression.  It  is  the  place  where 
the  older  members  of  the  community  have  the 
best  chance  to  stay  young.  The  university 
should  be  essentially  a  company  of  enthusiasts, 
of  pioneers.  There  is  a  frontier  for  every  worker 
to  clear  —  no  matter  how  narrow  or  how  wide 
his  horizon  may  be.  In  a  university  there  is 
no  proper  place,  among  faculty  or  students,  for 
the  disillusioned,  the  cynical,  the  defeatist. 

Now  we  come  to  the  application  of  the  second 
lesson,  the  lesson  of  mobilization,  of  team  play. 
In  the  first  place,  no  university  is  alive  where 
mobilization  is  limited  to  the  Recorder's  office. 
In  a  live  institution,  regent,  professor,  student, 
janitor,  each  is  a  part  of  the  game  and  must 
feel  that  he  is.  He  must  feel  that  in  its  ad- 
ministration the  institution  has  learned  the 
great  lesson  of  direct  and  human  personal  con- 
tact. Science,  among  all  its  triumphs,  cannot 
include  any  device  for  conveying  a  message 
from  mind  to  mind  or  from  heart  to  heart  half 

77 


SOME   WAR-TIME   LESSONS 

so  good  as  the  human  voice  and  the  human  eye. 
Within  the  faculty,  this  element  of  human  co- 
operation should  be  reflected  by  the  vitality  of 
the  organism  rather  than  by  the  complexity  of 
the  organization,  which  may  not  be  vital  at  all. 
Each  member  must  feel  that  the  general  repute 
is  safeguarded  by  honest  and  intelligent  stand- 
ards, honestly  and  intelligently  administered. 
The  university,  like  the  country  at  large,  must 
make  itself  responsible  for  all  of  each  and  every 
student,  his  bodily  condition,  for  example,  just 
as  directly  as  his  mental. 

It  will  be  recalled  that  one  of  my  justifications 
for  applying  war  experiences  to  university  con- 
ditions was  the  share  which  the  college  and 
university  men  had  in  building  up  our  supply  of 
officers.  If  we  study  why  the  college  men  made 
good  officers,  and  make  allowance  for  the  fact 
that  it  is  the  kind  of  man  who  goes  to  college 
who  is  likely  to  make  a  good  officer  anyway, 
and  all  the  other  allowances  we  can  think  of, 
we  can't  dodge  the  conclusion  that  there  is  some- 
thing outside  of  the  college  curriculum  which 
has  been  an  important  factor  in  bringing  about 
the  results.  On  the  other  hand,  important  as 
the  other  factors  are,  the  curriculum  has  had 
its  share,  and  it  is  in  my  judgment  a  leading  and 

78 


WHAT  HAVE  WE  LEARNED? 

not  always  an  adequately  recognized  share. 
The  comfortable  theory  that  once  he  has  settled 
down  to  something  important  the  college  ne'er- 
do-well  will  suddenly  blossom  forth  into  a  com- 
petent leader  of  men  didn't  work  out  in  practice. 
It  may  have  happened  here  and  there,  but  it 
didn't  happen  as  a  general  rule.  In  the  fight- 
ing line,  it  was  very  generally  the  man  with  a 
sound  academic  record,  not  necessarily  the  Phi 
Beta  Kappa  lad,  but  the  good  scholar  and 
active  college  citizen,  the  man  who  had  taken 
the  trouble  to  learn  things  and  learn  people, 
who  made  the  best  record.  I  naturally  watched 
with  particular  interest  the  records  of  my  own 
old  students  at  Columbia,  and  I  know  that  this 
is  so. 

It  is  a  significant  fact,  however,  for  those  of 
us  who  are  interested  in  the  welfare  of  college 
boys  and  girls,  that  the  United  States  govern- 
ment deliberately  built  up  what  was  to  all 
intents  and  purposes  an  undergraduate  college 
life  for  the  young  men  of  the  army,  with  ath- 
letics, dances,  dramatics,  singing,  and  all  the 
rest,  even  including  opportunities  for  reading 
and  study.  Even  the  most  hardened  of  regular 
officers,  who  at  the  first,  I  fear,  regarded  this  as 

79 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

some  of  the  civilian  foolishness  with  which  all 
soldiers  have  to  contend,  came  to  see  that  the 
program  was  a  vital  factor  in  building  up  such 
a  body  of  fighting  men  as  they  had  never  seen. 
And  this  is  only  another  way  of  saying  that  if 
you  want  to  use  the  human  machine  for  any 
purpose,  you  must  concern  yourself  with  the 
whole  of  it.  Human  nature  does  not  come  in 
air-tight  compartments. 

President  Wilson  coined  a  phrase  which  has 
thoroughly  gone  the  rounds  when  he  said  that 
the  side-shows  of  college  life  should  not  over- 
shadow nor  distract  from  the  entertainment  in 
the  main  tent.  We  all  agree  to  this.  But  I 
think  we  are  more  inclined  than  when  the 
words  were  spoken  to  urge  that  the  side-shows, 
properly  and  intelligently  subordinated,  should 
be  under  the  same  management  as  the  main 
tent.  The  army  has  tried  the  experiment  on 
a  large  scale  and  it  has  worked  well.  In  Feb- 
ruary last  there  were  in  France  and  on  the 
Rhine  six  million  and  a  half  individual  par- 
ticipants in  athletic  games,  ten  million  attend- 
ants on  entertainments,  nearly  a  quarter  of  a 
million  students. 

None    of   the   lessons   which   the   Army   has 
80 


WHAT  HAVE  WE  LEARNED? 

learned  are  more  significant  than  those  which 
have  to  do  with  mobilization  and  classification. 
The  activities  of  the  Provost  Marshal  General, 
of  the  Committee  on  Classification  and  Person- 
nel, in  cooperation  with  the  Committee  on 
Education,  furnish  the  best  record  of  large  scale 
human  engineering  in  the  new  science  of  per- 
sonnel of  which  we  have  any  record,  either  in 
this  country  or,  I  think,  elsewhere. 

A  university  like  this  one  is  an  army,  and 
not  such  a  small  army  either,  judging  by  peace- 
tune  standards.  The  United  States  found  that 
it  was  worth  while,  indeed  that  it  was  abso- 
lutely necessary  in  organizing  its  forces,  to 
find  out  everything  it  could  about  every  man 
in  the  army,  what  he  needed  physically  to  in- 
crease his  efficiency;  what  he  needed  to  keep 
him  interested  and  out  of  mischief;  what  he 
should  have  in  the  way  of  training  —  based  on 
what  he  knew  already  and  based  on  careful 
mental  tests  —  to  make  him  of  the  greatest 
usefulness;  whether  he  had  the  will  to  win, 
and  if  not,  whether  anything  could  be  done 
to  get  it  into  him. 

In  a  word,  the  United  States  wanted  to  know 
just  what  each  man's  possibilities  were.  Was 
he  officer  material  or  non-com  material?  Should 

81 


SOME   WAR-TIME   LESSONS 

he  go  into  the  line  or  one  of  the  special  corps  —  or 
to  the  labor  battalion?  As  a  result  of  this  program, 
the  Army  succeeded  in  finding  a  place  that  counted 
for  98  per  cent  of  the  drafted  men. 

Now  I  realize  that  a  university  can't  do  all 
these  things  with  its  army  in  just  the  way  the 
government  can.  It  can't  casually  transfer  a 
man  from  engineering  to  psychology,  nor  a  girl 
from  philosophy  to  cookery  —  or  vice  versa  - 
no  matter  how  desirable  such  a  transfer  might 
be  for  the  individual  and  the  community.  But 
it  can  do  a  great  deal  more  than  it  now  does  in 
finding  out  about  all  its  members,  informing 
them  of  their  strength  and  weaknesses,  in  seeing 
that  every  student  gets  a  chance  to  enjoy  in 
so  far  as  possible  the  high  privileges  of  youth, 
and  to  get  a  helping  hand  over  the  bumps  in 
the  road,  which  also  come  with  youth.  Every 
student  ought  to  have  the  opportunity  to  round 
out  his  character  and  his  capacities.  It  ought 
not  to  be  left  to  chance  that  any  student  gets 
the  best  personal  contacts  for  him  or  her  with 
faculty  and  fellow-students,  the  best  oppor- 
tunities for  learning  team  play.  Every  student 
ought  to  leave  with  some  definite  aim  in  life, 
and  if  possible  an  aim  high  enough  to  be  an  ideal 
that  is  worth  working  for. 

82 


WHAT   HAVE  WE   LEARNED? 

A  university  is  not  doing  its  full  duty  if  its 
athletics  and  social  life  are  limited  to  those  who 
need  these  the  least;  if  its  alumni  are  regarded 
merely  as  fillers  of  the  grandstands  or  recipients 
of  oratory,  and  possible  sources  of  pecuniary 
support.  The  alumni  are  the  best  possible 
sources  of  keeping  the  faculty  informed  as  to 
what  the  world  really  wants  in  the  way  of 
trained  men  and  women,  and,  for  the  students, 
of  information,  suggestions,  and  jobs,  both 
temporary  and  permanent. 

I  realize  that  many  of  these  things  are  now 
done  here  and  elsewhere,  but  in  the  light  of 
what  we  have  learned  from  the  experience  of 
the  University  of  Uncle  Sam,  I  am  sure  that  our 
American  universities  and  colleges  have  hardly 
scratched  the  surface  of  what  they  might  do 
and  what,  I  think,  they  will  ultimately  do  in 
the  realm  of  human  engineering.  Nearly  all 
educational  institutions  merely  follow  what  they 
find  the  leaders  are  doing,  and  in  this  field  there 
is  an  opportunity,  I  am  sure,  for  real  leadership. 

We  know  now  that  men  and  women  can  be 
measured  by  impersonal  tests  and  that  it  is 
practicable  to  put  aside  the  material  which  it  is 
either  impossible  to  fashion  in  the  academic 
mould,  or  for  which,  even  if  the  job  is  possible, 

83 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

the  expense  in  wear  and  tear  is  entirely  beyond 
the  value  of  the  result  to  be  obtained.  To  be 
specific,  why  shouldn't  we  have  an  intelligence 
test  of  candidates  for  the  degree  of  Doctor  of 
Philosophy,  just  as  we  had  a  physical  and 
psychological  examination  for  candidates  for 
the  flying  schools? 

I  don't  mean  that  we  should  leap  from  one 
illogical  position  clear  across  the  road  into 
another.  Mental  measurements  are  not  yet 
an  exact  science,  and  a  man  of  moderate  ability, 
with  a  will  to  succeed,  may  be  a  better  aca- 
demic investment  than  his  more  brilliant  brother 
who  lacks  that  quality;  but,  by  pruning  very 
sparingly  (one  does  not  have  to  chop  down  a 
tree  to  prune  it)  the  saving  in  time  and  energy 
will  be  enormous. 

Fundamentally  the  human  relationships  are 
what  count,  the  qualities  leading  to  team  play 
and  cooperation,  and  away  from  isolation  and 
its  ills.  This  means  that  if  a  faculty  is  to 
exercise  its  leadership,  it  must  know  the  student 
body,  it  must  maintain  and  develop  points  of 
human  touch.  Impersonal  tests,  impersonal  rec- 
ords, all  that  modern  practice  and  modern 
science  can  teach  us  we  must  have,  but  these 
must  be  used  only  as  the  framework  for  what  is 

84 


WHAT  HAVE  WE  LEARNED? 

after  all  the  fundamental  thing,  direct  human 
contact  between  teacher  and  teacher,  teacher 
and  student,  and  student  and  student. 

Now  as  to  leadership,  and  in  a  university  we 
can  identify  the  leaders  with  the  teachers,  there 
is  no  doubt,  I  think,  that  the  teachers'  pro- 
fession comes  out  of  the  war  in  a  higher  place 
than  it  went  in,  and  the  scholar  goes  back  to 
his  work  with  a  feeling  of  confidence  in  himself 
in  view  of  his  record  in  competition  and  com- 
parison with  men  in  other  callings.  I  venture 
to  predict  that  we  shall  hear  a  good  deal  less 
frequently  in  the  future  the  old  gibe  that  the 
man  who  could  do  things  did  them  and  the 
man  who  couldn't,  taught  them.  The  teachers 
made  good,  not  only  because  of  their  scholar- 
ship, but  because  of  their  personality.  I  think 
this  experience  of  the  last  two  years  is  going  to 
accelerate  greatly  the  movement  which  had 
already  started  of  turning  to  the  academic 
world  for  the  man  who  can  do  things  and  do 
them  with  other  people.  Entirely  apart  from 
the  contrasts  in  income,  the  sheer  fun  of  ex- 
ecutive work,  with  plenty  of  money  to  spend  on 
what  you  want  to  get  done,  is  a  pretty  strong 
temptation  for  a  man  with  a  heavy  teaching 

85 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

schedule  and  an  annual  department  appropria- 
tion of  say  $75.  Both  the  regular  army  officers 
who  have  made  conspicuously  good,  and  the 
scholars  of  the  cooperative  type  who  have  made 
conspicuously  good,  are  being  actively  bidden 
for  by  bankers  and  manufacturers  and  all  sorts 
of  people.  Neither  profession  can  compete  on 
the  purely  financial  side  with  these  tempters 
and,  in  order  to  hold  their  first-rate  men,  they 
will  each  have  to  make  some  greater  contribution 
in  the  things  that  money  alone  can't  buy. 

Both  in  the  nation  and  in  our  republics  of 
letters  and  science,  we  must  learn  to  distinguish 
more  clearly  between  the  power  that  comes  with 
knowledge,  and  the  ability  to  talk  about  things. 
It  was  very  interesting  to  watch  in  Washington 
the  gradual  substitution  of  the  man  with  the 
latter  quality  by  the  man  with  the  former  in 
positions  of  responsibility,  and  I  am  going  to 
confess  that,  in  the  early  days,  some  of  the 
conferences  which  it  was  my  privilege  or  my 
duty  to  attend,  reminded  me  for  all  the  world 
of  certain  faculty  meetings,  in  which  gentlemen 
without  definite  knowledge  of  the  matter  in  hand 
were  discussing  at  considerable  length  what  they 
were  pleased  to  call  principles,  but  which  were 
really  off-hand  impressions. 

86 


WHAT   HAVE  WE   LEARNED? 

I  think  that  in  their  service  to  the  university 
and  to  the  nation,  the  scholars  may  well  profit 
by  the  demonstration  that  it  was  not  only  the 
man  who  knew  his  subject,  but  the  man  who 
knew  how  to  deal  with  his  fellow  men,  who 
was  likely  to  make  his  impression.  Isn't  there 
such  a  thing  as  academic  provincialism,  even 
within  the  walls  of  a  man's  own  university, 
certainly  as  between  institution  and  institution, 
which  can  be  remedied  by  the  encouragement 
of  these  social  and  cooperative  sides  of  the 
scholar's  character?  It  seems  to  me  that  we 
all  should  face  a  fundamental  extension  in  the 
definition  of  a  scholar,  away  from  the  individ- 
ual, the  selfish,  out  to  the  social  and  con- 
structive. 

In  our  educational  institutions  scholarship  has 
three  functions:  To  broaden  the  field  of  exist- 
ing knowledge,  and  the  war  has  shown  us  that 
every  field  has  its  valuable  practical  applications; 
to  train  the  coming  generation  of  experts,  and 
any  country  needs  not  only  a  handful  of  distin- 
guished leaders  but  a  great  body  of  well-trained 
men  and  women  who,  when  the  emergency  arises, 
stand  ready  to  meet  it;  and  last  but  not  least, 
to  inspire  a  recognition  of  what  scholarship  is 
and  a  respect  for  it  in  the  minds  of  the  general 

87 


SOME  WAR-TIME   LESSONS 

students,  few  of  whom,  by  the  most  generous 
stretch  of  the  imagination,  can  be  regarded  as 
scholars  themselves,  but  whose  influence  in  their 
generation  throughout  the  country  is  a  very  im- 
portant factor.  Our  nation  needs  a  respect  for 
expert  knowledge  and  it  needs  a  respect  for  in- 
telligence, and  our  college  graduates  can  do  more 
than  any  other  group  to  develop  this  respect. 

We  have  taken  up  three  of  our  four  lessons  as 
these  affect  the  university:  the  emphasis  on 
youth,  the  need  of  mobilization  and  team  play, 
and  the  need  of  leadership.  There  remains  the 
fourth  factor,  a  high,  clear-cut  aim. 

The  most  serious  charge  against  the  American 
undergraduate  in  the  past  has  been  the  lack 
of  a  sense  of  responsibility.  We  now  know 
from  their  war  records  that  the  sense  of  re- 
sponsibility lay  latent  in  thousands  of  these 
boys  and  was  only  awaiting  an  impulse  suffi- 
ciently strong  to  arouse  it. 

President  Hibben  of  Princeton,  who  ought  to 
know  the  American  undergraduate  if  anybody 
does,  said  recently:  " Young  men  are  capable 
of  far  greater  amounts  of  intensive  work  day  in 
and  day  out  than  we  had  dreamed  of;  capable 
of  greater  concentration  of  mind  upon  their 

88 


WHAT   HAVE  WE   LEARNED? 

tasks.  They  respond  more  quickly  than  we 
have  conceived  to  the  call  of  duty.  The  sense 
of  responsibility  is  there  latent,  and  we  teachers 
must  endeavor  to  quicken  and  to  appeal  to  it. 
We  have  seen  that  when  the  occasion  comes 
these  young  men  rise  to  meet  it." 

We  can't  very  well  stage  a  world  war  for  the 
purpose,  and  I  don't  think  we  need  wait  for 
any  such  crisis  to  bring  it  out.  There  is  in 
every  normal,  wholesome-minded  student  some 
motor  nerve  that  can  be  touched  in  such  a  way 
as  to  release  that  type  of  coordinated  energy 
which  we  call  a  sense  of  responsibility.  This 
all  goes  back  to  knowing  our  men  and  women 
and  establishing  human  contacts  and  human 
confidences. 

In  spite  of  individual  disappointments,  and  as 
a  college  dean,  I  have  had  my  share,  f  am 
confident  that  the  normal  young  American 
either  already  possesses  as  a  motive  force  some 
worth-while  aim  or  that  he  can  be  guided 
toward  such  an  aim  if  approached  in  the  right 
way. 

Let  me  quote  a  paragraph  or  so  from  the 
report  of  the  War  Department  Committee  on 
Education : 

"  Because  the  war  did  completely  organize 
89 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

the  nation  for  a  united  drive  and  thus  did  ex- 
pose a  magnificent  national  morale,  many  are 
inclined  to  believe  that  war  is  necessary  to  call 
forth  such  consecration  and  self -forgetful  service. 
Analysis  of  the  war  training,  however,  reveals 
a  point  of  view  and  a  method  of  procedure  that 
is  definitely  designed  to  develop  team-play  and 
to  enhance  morale  whether  there  be  war  or  not. 
If  these  methods  are  applied  to  education  in 
tunes  of  peace,  they  certainly  will  produce  some 
effect  even  though  the  result  is  not  as  pro- 
foundly striking  as  it  was  during  the  war. 
Among  the  many  significant  features  of  war 
training,  the  following  are  mentioned  as  worthy 
of  particular  consideration  for  transfer  to  school 
practice : 

"As  a  primary  policy,  a  nation  at  war  is 
obliged  to  recognize  that  every  individual  is 
an  asset  capable  of  useful  service  in  some  par- 
ticular line  of  work  of  direct  benefit  to  the  coun- 
try. In  order  to  make  the  most  efficient  use 
of  all  its  resources,  it  is  necessary  to  make 
strenuous  exertions  to  discover  what  each  in- 
dividual is  best  qualified  to  do  and  to  train 
each  to  use  his  abilities  in  the  most  effective 
manner.  Applied  to  education  this  fundamental 
attitude  produces  two  results  that  are  of  im- 

90 


WHAT   HAVE  WE   LEARNED? 

portance  in  the  development  of  morale.  The 
teacher's  point  of  view  shifts  from  a  critical 
one,  with  attention  focused  on  discovering 
whether  the  individual  measures  up  to  the 
academic  standards  fixed  by  school  authorities, 
to  one  of  friendly,  not  to  say  eager  interest  to 
discover  what  each  individual  really  can  do 
well.  The  student's  spirit  also  changes  from 
one  of  discouragement  and  doubt  of  his  ability 
ever  to  make  good,  to  one  of  interest  and  desire 
for  achievement.  Both  of  these  results  are 
of  large  importance  in  releasing  energy  for  both 
the  teacher  and  the  student.  They  also  have 
an  immediate  bearing  on  the  enhancement  of 
morale" 

In  any  place  of  campaign  to  this  end  within  a 
college  or  university,  the  first  thing  to  do  is 
to  build  around  that  vague  but  very  real  emo- 
tion called  college  spirit,  to  supplement  this  by 
guiding  our  young  people  to  enlist  in  worth- 
while, nation-wide  or  world-wide  causes  (we 
are  singularly  provincial  about  this  in  America), 
and  by  ensuring  better  teaching  and  super- 
vision and  better  coordination  of  work. 

There  is  no  question  that  we  have  underesti- 
mated both  the  American  undergraduate's  capacity 
for  intellectual  work  and  his  real  pleasure  in  it 

91 


SOME  WAR-TIME   LESSONS 

when  he  feels  it  worth  while.  One  of  my 
friends  was  telling  me  of  his  experiences  as 
commanding  officer  of  one  of  the  ground 
schools  for  aviators,  where  a  large  proportion 
of  the  candidates  were  college  undergraduates, 
and  I  asked  him  if  he  had  had  any  troubles. as 
to  discipline.  "Yes  indeed,"  he  replied,  " night 
after  night  we'd  catch  some  fellows  studying 
with  a  peep-light  under  their  blankets,  after 
taps  had  sounded." 

Any  doubts  as  to  the  instinctive  reaction  of 
the  normal,  healthy  young  American  toward 
educational  opportunities  were  dispelled  by  the 
experiences  of  the  army  in  France  after  the 
armistice.  The  let-down,  after  the  terrific  phys- 
ical and  emotional  strain,  the  impatience  regard- 
ing any  delay  as  to  return  home,  combined  to 
make  a  pretty  serious  situation  as  to  the  morale 
of  our  troops.  After  some  misguided  and 
nearly  disastrous  experiments  as  to  the  cura- 
tive properties  of  heavy  drill  and  strict  disci- 
pline, the  A.E.F.  recognized  the  necessity  for 
a  prompt  and  thorough  stimulation  of  all  the 
welfare  activities,  and  a  real  educational  pro- 
gram; and  it  was  straight,  old-fashioned  book- 
work  more  than  it  was  the  movies,  or  athletics, 
more  even  than  Miss  Elsie  Janis,  which  turned 

92 


WHAT  HAVE  WE  LEARNED? 

the  corner  for  us.  In  all,  more  than  200,000 
men  volunteered  for  the  privilege  of  studying. 
The  military  order  was  often  reversed  and 
majors  sat  at  the  feet  of  the  corporals  or  pri- 
vates who  had  been  selected  as  teachers.  The 
reports  as  to  the  intensity  of  the  work  of  teach- 
ers and  students  alike  should  put  any  of  us 
professionals  to  shame. 

Just  now  we  are  hearing  a  great  deal  about 
the  benefits  of  discipline.  I  think  what  the 
speakers  are  really  talking  about,  though  they 
don't  recognize  it  themselves,  is  the  benefit  of 
the  state  of  mind  which  accepts  and  welcomes 
discipline.  We  are  not,  even  as  the  result  of 
the  war,  a  disciplined  people  in  the  sense  that 
Germany  is,  or  was,  and  we  can  thank  God 
for  it.  We  shall  never  want  in  this  country  a 
general  subordination  of  the  individual  will  and 
initiative  to  external  control.  Discipline  is  a 
means  and  not  an  end.  If  discipline,  as  such, 
externally  imposed,  were  so  important  a  factor 
in  success  as  many  people  seem  to  think  to- 
day, we  could  look  through  a  list  of  ex-enlisted 
men  in  the  army  and  navy  —  I  mean  the  men 
enlisted  and  discharged  during  peace  time  — 
and  find  a  relatively  large  number  who  made 

93 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

conspicuously  good  records  after  returning  to 
civil  life.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  we  find  nothing 
of  the  kind. 

What  we  do  find  is  that  not  a  few  enlisted  men 
who  chose  the  army  or  the  navy  as  their  per- 
manent career  have  won  commissions  and  made 
fine  records.  There  were  no  better  general 
officers  in  the  war  than  men  like  Harbord  of 
our  army  and  Robertson  of  the  British,  both  of 
whom  rose  from  the  ranks.  But  isn't  it  fair  to 
say  that  the  discipline  imposed  on  these  men  was 
accepted  gladly  and  accepted  in  the  terms  of  their 
fundamental  interest,  and  that  these  men  are  not 
really  exceptions  to  what  I  have  said? 

I  venture  to  predict  that  there  will  be  a  very 
different  record  to  tell  as  to  the  success  in  civil 
life  of  those  men  now  leaving  the  Army,  who, 
because  they  believed  in  the  cause  and  wished 
to  participate  to  the  full  in  the  great  enterprise, 
gladly  submitted  themselves  to  the  discipline  for 
the  purpose  of  increasing  their  efficiency. 

In  a  month  or  so  you  can  teach  an  enthusiastic 
man,  who  is  fired  by  a  big  idea,  all  the  disci- 
pline he  needs  for  carrying  out  his  duties  and 
profiting  by  his  opportunities,  but  you  can't 
reverse  the  process  and  incite  enthusiasms  as 
a  result  of  the  application  of  discipline. 

94 


WHAT   HAVE  WE   LEARNED? 

Don't  think  that  I  want  to  minimize  the 
merits  of  military  discipline  for  military  pur- 
poses. Of  course,  coordination  and  subordina- 
tion are  absolutely  necessary  in  the  handling  of 
large  bodies  of  men.  Even  the  men  in  France 
who  deserted  to  the  front,  as  many  of  them 
did,  no  matter  how  much  we  may  sympathize 
with  their  desire  to  get  into  the  game,  had  to 
be  disciplined.  Someone  had  to  stay  behind 
and  see  to  the  supplies.  The  point  we  are  dis- 
cussing is  the  carrying  over  of  this  principle  of 
military  discipline  intact  into  civilian  life.  So 
far  as  discipline  brings  about  regularity  of  life, 
of  exercise,  so  long  as  it  ministers  to  alertness, 
we  can  use  it,  but  as  between  discipline  on  the 
one  hand,  and  initiative  and  team  play  on  the 
other,  to  meet  our  academic  or  our  national 
needs,  I  am  for  initiative  and  team  play. 

Please  don't  misunderstand  me.  By  reducing 
the  present  emphasis  on  external  discipline, 
after  childhood  has  been  passed,  I  don't  mean 
a  lowering  of  standards.  External  discipline,  it 
seems  to  me,  is  often  really  imposed  as  a  sub- 
stitute for  high  standards;  something  supposed 
to  be  just  as  good  and  more  easy  to  keep  in 
stock.  The  standards  of  the  worth-while  or- 
ganization, and  these  are  the  outward  expression 

95 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

of  its  aims,  its  ideals,  ought  to  be  high  enough 
and  intelligently  enough  administered  to  make 
sure  that  the  men  and  women  who  are  unable 
to  provide  their  own  discipline,  should  in  the 
general  interest  be  painlessly  but  promptly 
removed  from  the  group. 

Here  is  a  credo  for  the  American  people,  from 
the  pen  of  a  regular  army  officer.  It's  a 
pretty  good  one  for  an  American  University: 
"To  foster  individual  talent,  imagination  and 
initiative,  to  couple  with  this  a  high  degree  of 
cooperation,  and  to  subject  these  to  a  not  too 
minute  direction;  the  whole  vitalized  by  a 
supreme  purpose,  which  serves  as  the  magic 
key  to  unlock  the  upper  strata  of  the  energies 
of  men." 

Finally,  let  me  try  to  apply  these  lessons  to 
you  young  men  and  women  of  the  graduating 
class. 

Keep  in  good  physical  shape.  Over-work  is 
usually  a  combination  of  bad  air,  bad  feeding, 
and  lack  of  exercise  and  sleep.  See  that  you 
don't  go  stale.  If  you  lack  the  zest  of  life,  find 
out  what  the  trouble  is;  whether  it  is  your  teeth 
or  your  liver  or  your  soul.  Picture  to  yourself 
what  Theodore  Roosevelt  got  out  of  life. 

96 


WHAT   HAVE  WE   LEARNED? 

Be  honest  with  yourself.  Do  your  own 
thinking  and  do  it  straight.  This,  strangely 
enough,  is  perhaps  the  thing  which  you  will  find 
hardest  to  do  after  the  undergraduate  atmos- 
phere. A  student  body  is,  or  at  any  rate  was 
before  the  war,  the  most  convention  ridden 
group  of  which  I  have  any  knowledge.  I  am 
all  for  conventions,  because  they  save  a  great 
deal  of  time  and  worry,  but  only  so  far  as  we 
recognize  them  as  conventions  and  do  not  exalt 
them  into  principles  or  philosophical  truths. 
Remember  that  the  public  opinion  of  America 
is  an  infinitely  more  important  thing  to  the 
world  than  ever  before,  and  that  you  are  each 
to  be  a  part  of  it. 

Keep  your  intellectual  interests  and  your 
interest  in  your  alma  mater,  not  in  her  athletics 
and  her  fraternities  alone.  Remember  that  as 
alumni  of  this  University  you  are  citizens  of 
no  mean  city.  Recruit  men  and  women  whom 
she  ought  to  have  and  who  ought  to  have  her, 
remembering  that  the  danger  to  this  country 
from  the  inside,  and  it  is  no  inconsiderable 
danger,  is  mainly  due  to  the  misdirected  zeal 
of  sincere  people  who  lack  knowledge  and 
background.  Take  for  example  the  employer 
who  can't  see  beyond  the  point  of  telling  his 

97 


SOME  WAR-TIME  LESSONS 

men  to  "take  it  or  leave  it,"  and  the  workman 
whose  sense  of  real  or  fancied  injustice  has 
brought  him  to  what  with  our  children  we  know 
as  the  kicking  and  biting  stage.  It  is  too  late 
to  do  much  with  the  present  adult  generation 
except  by  main  strength  and  awkwardness,  but 
a  recruit  for  higher  education  from  either  of 
these  groups  is  a  good  national  investment. 

Keep  your  human  contacts.  Don't  be  a 
"  glad-hander "  but  do  at  least  your  share.  It 
takes  two  to  make  and  keep  alive  a  friendship, 
just  as  it  does  a  quarrel.  There  is  something 
worth  while  in  everyone.  Give  yourself  a  chance 
to  find  what  it  is.  Practice  following  and,  as 
the  chance  comes  to  you,  practice  leading,  but 
above  all,  practice  team  play.  Keep  yourself 
ready  to  take  the  next  step,  whatever  it  may 
be.  There  is  a  story  of  Marshal  Joffre,  of 
which  I  can  at  least  say  that  it  is  good  enough 
to  be  true.  After  the  first  battle  of  the  Marne 
some  enthusiast  was  proclaiming  him  as  a  second 
Napoleon  and  laying  it  on  pretty  thick.  The 
old  gentleman  stood  it  as  long  as  he  could  and 
then  said:  "No,  Napoleon  would  have  known 
what  to  do  next,  and  I  don't." 

Keep  your  enthusiasms  and  your  ideals.  In 
other  words,  keep  your  youth.  In  choosing 

98 


WHAT  HAVE  WE  LEARNED? 

your  life  work,  get  into  something  in  which  the 
policy  and  practice  are  such  that  you  can  throw 
your  whole  soul  into  the  job.  Don't  take  your- 
self seriously,  but  take  your  opportunities  for 
usefulness  seriously.  Find  out  the  callings  in 
which  America  is  short.  There  are  plenty  of 
them,  as  the  war  has  shown.  Think  over 
whether  it  isn't  possible  for  you  to  be  one  of 
the  men  or  one  of  the  women  who,  from  your 
training  and  momentum  and  vision,  will  be 
selected  ten  or  fifteen  or  twenty  years  hence, 
to  take  on  some  important  job,  with  the  nation 
as  your  client,  as  the  one  person  best  qualified 
to  fill  it. 

We  no  longer  have  to  prove  that  it  pays  to 
know,  to  really  know  almost  anything  that  is 
worth  while.  It  pays  hi  money,  if  that  is  what 
one  wants;  it  pays  in  the  more  enduring  sat- 
isfactions of  life,  in  the  pleasure  that  comes 
from  exact  knowledge  and  intellectual  pioneering, 
in  the  almost  unique  joy  of  creation  without 
the  responsibilities  of  possession,  and  in  the 
feeling  of  individual  readiness  to  be  of  use  in 
meeting  the  problems  which  the  years  allotted 
to  your  generation  will  surely  bring  forth. 


99 


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